Yes I know I am a google whore. It’s been said before. Here is the deal however. If the Healthcare Industry…and that is what it is, an Industry, cut their energy cost tomorrow, they could pass that savings on to you and “bend the healthcare curve down”.
Health care buildings account for 11 percent of all commercial energy consumption, using a total of 561 trillion Btu of combined site electricity, natural gas, fuel oil, and district steam or hot water. They are the fourth highest consumer of total energy of all the building types (see total energy figure on home page).
Natural gas and electricity are the predominant fuels used in health care buildings, with natural gas used a bit more than electricity. Health care buildings are more likely to use district heat than most building types.
Site electricity is the amount of electricity consumed within the building; electricity use can also be expressed as primary electricity, which includes the energy consumed in generating and transmitting electricity. Health care buildings used 637 trillion Btu of primary electricity, which brings the total energy consumption for health care buildings up to 987 trillion Btu, or 9 percent of total primary consumption for all commercial buildings.
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Some estimates put it as low as 9%, but that would be real savings.
Employees and executives are being called upon to assist as organizations implement “green” systems within healthcare facilities. The term “green building” or “sustainability” can mean a variety of things. Commonly, however, “green” design and construction includes:
promoting a healthier, more productive build environment;
increasing energy efficiency;
increasing efficiency in the use of water and other scarce resources;
reducing the project’s impact on the surrounding environment; and
decreasing liquid and solid wastes, building emissions, and other adverse impacts of the building’s operation on the broader environment.
Sustainability has particular resonance for healthcare facilities because improved indoor environmental quality demonstrably improves the health of patients, professionals, staff and visitors. Further, healthcare facilities are major generators of waste and are substantial consumers of increasingly energy and water.
Healthcare facilities generate more than 2 million tons of solid waste annually, which accounts for the majority of hospital waste disposal cost. Given a likely increase in waste disposal costs, designing or renovating a facility to more efficiently handle waste is an economic necessity.
Additionally, equipment-intensive facilities use several times more energy than office buildings, while hospitals typically use 90 to150 gallons of water per bed per day. In fact, healthcare facilities account for 9% of all commercial energy consumption in America, according to the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration.
This article says it all. Why did America lose 16 million jobs is the last three recessions? Because the Rich and the Capitalists got bored with making money the old fashioned way and decided playing the markets was easier and more fun. Why beside laziness have they decided that America will become a second class country? Oh they blame the unions, deficit spending, socialism etc., but all the elites really know right now is that greed is good and attacking other countries is really profitable.
WASHINGTON – U.S. companies are getting squeezed out of the big Chinese wind-power market even as Dallas investors are bringing Chinese firms here via a big wind farm in Texas, according to a new industry report.
“They’ve used every measure you could possibly think of to enhance production of renewable energy equipment in China,” said report author Alan Wolff of the trade law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP.
U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk won a pledge from the Chinese last fall to drop rules giving preference to Chinese makers of wind-power equipment. But Kirk’s office hasn’t seen any evidence that the pledge has been carried out, said spokeswoman Carol Guthrie.
Meanwhile, Chinese manufacturers are entering the U.S. wind market under a joint venture led by Dallas investor Cappy McGarr.
McGarr’s U.S. Renewable Energy Group, with Cielo Wind Power LP of Austin and China’s Shenyang Power Group, is planning a $1.5 billion, 600-megawatt wind farm on 36,000 acres in West Texas.
Several U.S. senators have complained that the West Texas project would use hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. economic stimulus funds for wind turbines built in China. They introduced a bill this month that would halt federal funding of renewable energy projects until “buy American” requirements are written into law.
McGarr’s Chinese partners announced plans last week to build a wind turbine factory in Nevada, and McGarr says most of the jobs for the West Texas project will be American.
“A minimum of 70 percent of each wind turbine in the … project, including the massive towers and blades, will be wholly manufactured in the United States and made entirely of American steel,” McGarr said.
Dewey & LeBoeuf’s report on China’s renewable energy equipment market was done for a U.S. industry group, the National Foreign Trade Council, where concern about China’s market restrictions and treatment of foreign firms is growing.
“If you’re not operating under a rule-of-law country, if you have no place to adjudicate, and there are places where the country has stacked the deck against you, you may look for somewhere else” to do business, said trade council president Bill Reinsch.
Some wind power advocates are urging everyone to calm down and are particularly concerned about the Senate “Buy American” bill.
“This proposal would torpedo one of the most successful job creation efforts of the Recovery Act [the economic stimulus program], which has already preserved half of the 85,000 American jobs in the U.S. wind industry,” said Denise Bode, president of the American Wind Energy Association.
All of those things could have taken SEVERAL Years to complete.You have to ask yourself, “How badly must my house have been designed for me to have to do all this work”? The answer is VERY badly. The big housing push in post WWII America led to many bad practices. But let’s face it our population went from 60 million to over 325 million in 3 decades and energy was a nickle or less a kilowatt. That is just an excuse I know but it is all I got. Hostility to our environment is a genetic trait for Americans. Having a Capitalistic Economy does not help because it has a total disregard for the environment. It is in fact dismissed as an externality. Is Capitalism psychotic? Look at how it treats the only home we have got. It defiles it.
The most extreme eco-friendly houses of the future reduces the environmental impact on the planet and demonstrates how less means more quality living.
With so much attention being drawn towards the perils of our planet and the environmental impact that a global population is causing on natural resources, some forward-thinking companies and individuals are developing new ways to solve our housing needs and the future impact to the environment once built. It requires creative people like these to develop solutions to solve critical issues like the ones we have to deal with in today’s environment.
The majority of eco-friendly houses share similar engineering characteristics such as; smaller living spaces and recycled building materials incorporated into the design. Some houses incorporate solar panels, wood-burning stoves or other energy-saving heating and cooling appliances. The potential costs saving on utility bills, property taxes, home maintenance, and furniture would more than make this kind of living ideal for single or duel family housing.
Ewok-Style Tree House
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I could post the photos but out of respect I will say please see the article for more.
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This Ewok-style tree house designed by Canadian carpenter Tom Chudleigh saw the future and built it.
Portable Martin House-To-Go
Honestly, this has to be the most practical house on the planet that is eco-friendly to the extremes. Live anywhere and change your scenery when the mood strikes in your own portable house. The Martin portable house-to-go is built to the highest building standards and is weatherproofed with NASA-approved insulation to endure in extreme weather conditions.
Dome House
The Japanese are amazing engineers in both housing and technology, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that a prefab home manufacturer Japan called “Japan Dome Housing Co., Ltd., developed an amazingly energy-efficient, extreme weather durable, Styrofoam expandable modular igloo-shaped kit house. Oh, yes, it’s true. The house of the future that can be purchased and assembled by you and two or three of your friends in just a matter of 3-days if you work around the clock or about a week if you take your time.
This may be one of the best residential sites I have ever found and it is in Britain. Go figure. I mean if you scroll down and look at all the stuff it is pretty amazing.
DISTRIBUTED GENERATION AND ITS SOCIAL IMPACT
By Manu Avinash .G , S4, EEE, CET and
Krishna kumar .G , S4, EEE, CET
ABSTRACT- distributed generation, defined as generation located at or near the load centres, is being recognised as an environment friendly, reliable, and secure source of power which not only has minimal negative social impacts but also serves to promote social welfare. This paper aims to bring out the salient features of distributed generation from an economic and social perspective. The paper to identify the distributed resources available in India and proposes methods to tap them. It also studies the social consequences of wide spread deployment of distributed systems and their accommodation into the new liberalised energy market of India.
I. INTRODUCTION
Most of the electricity produced today is generated in large generating stations, which is then transmitted at high voltage to the load centres and transmitted to consumers at reduced voltage through local distribution systems. In contrast with large generating stations, distributed generation (DG) produce power on a customer’s site or at a local distribution network. DG technologies include
Engines,
Small hydro and gas turbines
Fuel cells
Photo voltaic systems etc
Although they represent a small share of the electricity market they play a key role for applications in which reliability is crucial, as a source of emergency capacity, and as an alternative to expansion of a local network, in developed economies where uninterrupted power supply is essential. In developing countries like India, where the generation is inadequate to meet the demand, reliability and energy security are of lesser importance. Developing country can tap the potential of DG to extend their present generation capacity in an environment friendly and cost friendly manner.
The paper is divided into two parts first part examines the various DG technologies and their merits and demerits and the second part studies the social impact of large scale deployment of small, mini and micro projects in India.
II. WHAT IS DISTRIBUTED GENERATION?
Distributed generation, is defined as generation located at or near the load centres [1]. They generate electricity through various small-scale power generation technologies. Distributed energy resources (DE) refers to a variety of small, modular power-generating technologies that can be combined with energy management and storage systems and used to improve the operation of the electricity delivery system, whether or not those technologies are connected to an electricity grid. . Projects are generally developed by either the user to avoid the purchase of power from the grid or an energy service provider who then retails the power to the site.
III. DISTRIBUTED GENERATION TECHNOLOGIES
Commercial energy technologies include:
Consumer advocates who favor DG point out that distributed resources can improve the efficiency of providing electric power. They often highlight that transmission of electricity from a power plant to a typical user wastes roughly 4.2 to 8.9 percent of the electricity as a consequence of aging transmission equipment, inconsistent enforcement of reliability guidelines, and growing congestion. At the same time, customers often suffer from poor power quality—variations in voltage or electrical flow—that results from a variety of factors, including poor switching operations in the network, voltage dips, interruptions, transients, and network disturbances from loads. Overall, DG proponents highlight the inefficiency of the existing large-scale electrical transmission and distribution network. Moreover, because customers’ electricity bills include the cost of this vast transmission grid, the use of on-site power equipment can conceivably provide consumers with affordable power at a higher level of quality. In addition, residents and businesses that generate power locally have the potential to sell surplus power to the grid, which can yield significant income during times of peak demand.
Industrial managers and contractors have also begun to emphasize the advantages of generating power on site. Cogeneration technologies permit businesses to reuse thermal energy that would normally be wasted. They have therefore become prized in industries that use large quantities of heat, such as the iron and steel, chemical processing, refining, pulp and paper manufacturing, and food processing industries. Similar generation hardware can also deploy recycled heat to provide hot water for use in aquaculture, greenhouse heating, desalination of seawater, increased crop growth and frost protection, and air preheating.
Beyond efficiency, DG technologies may provide benefits in the form of more reliable power for industries that require uninterrupted service. The Electric Power Research Institute reported that power outages and quality disturbances cost American businesses $119 billion per year. In 2001, the International Energy Agency (2002) estimated that the average cost of a one-hour power outage was $6,480,000 for brokerage operations and $2,580,000 for credit card operations. The figures grow more impressively for the semiconductor industry, where a two hour power outage can cost close to $48,000,000. Given these numbers, it remains no mystery why several firms have already installed DG facilities to ensure consistent power supplies
Yes it is true. It will take most of next week probably to get to 50 environmental blogs out of the 1000s of environmental blogs out there but we shall prevail. Notice I have not said anything about this blogs focus which is energy and its misuse which is damaging the planet. These are just eco blogs, some technical some not, that purport to reuse, recycle, repair, replenish, reincarnate, and my personal favorite (to protect my girlish figure) reduce. Excuse me I must
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Community Energy Systems is a nonprofit 501c3 organization chartered in Illinois in Sangamon County. As such we are dependent on public donations for our continued existence. We also use Adsense as a fundraiser. Please click on the ads that you see on this page, on our main page and on our Bulletin Board (Refrigerator Magnets) and you will be raising money for CES. We say a heartfelt THANK YOU to all who do.
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Speaking of being reduced by a Blog. I made mild fun of a Blog yesterday called, Gardening Naked. The woman that writes that Blog is amazing. She sent me an email yesterday and I have been reduce to kneeling before her in surrender:
We live in an increasingly materialistic society in the United States, and often take all the “stuff” we have for granted. With our communities surviving a very difficult economic time, it seems important to pull back on the gift giving and push forward with giving from the heart. It is not about how many gifts we give; it is about the love in our hearts when we give them.
When you do give a gift, consider giving a good-for-the-earth-gift. Green and sustainable gifts are the best gifts because they keep on giving even after the holidays are over. Try gifting your friends and family with green and sustainable presents this season and make a difference for our world. Below are a few of the best green gift giving guides online; great resources for you and your family to tap into this holiday season.
Sustainability expert and landfill rescuer, Kay McKeen, runs a School & Community Assistance for Recycling & Composting Education center in Illinois, also known as “SCARCE”. This organization has rescued millions of books from the landfills for free donation to local and international schools. SCARCE staff spends hundreds of hours educating locals on the benefits of living green and this year have built a terrific online green gift guide. To view SCARCE’s local-to-Chicagoland Green Gift Guide online, visit their web site – http://s-c-a-r-c-e.org or telephone (630) 545-9710.
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So she would be what number 21 or 22 on the list. I lost count. Also while on the “catalog” of environmental blogs yesterday, I found another catalog. This is beginning to sound a little like green porn or something.
Going through their list I came upon a site that raised a question in my head. I did a series last year about environmental groups around the world which was fascinating to me but until I saw this Blog I did not think “how hard must it be to be environmentally conscious in a third world country”? So we go from taking stuff home from a landfill to living in a land fill.
What is Malaysia Day ? Why isn’t it on the 31st August but instead 16 September ? 31st August 1957 is the day Malaya or better known than as the Federation of Malaya got their independence from British colonial rule.
Malaysia Day is held on September 16 every year to commemorate the establishment of the Malaysian federation on the same date in 1963, the joining together of Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak, and Singapore to form Malaysia.
Malaysia Day is not a public holiday.
I personally think that Malaysia Day should be given equal if not more importance, since it is the day our beloved nation came together as ONE. In order to get the whole nation to rally in the 1Malaysia concept, everyone should be make aware of the formation of MALAYSIA. It is a day every Malaysia should be proud of, and shout it out loud ” Saya anak bangsa Malaysia.”
To all fellow Malaysian wherever you are, HAPPY MALAYSIA DAY.
On a plissé des yeux devant la violence de « Lord of War ». On s’est repassé en boucle « Blood Diamond » (pas que pour Léo, on préfère Nicolas Cage d’abord) et on a bien décrypté le processus : le diamant, c’est définitivement pas du propre côté social, pas plus qu’environnemental d’ailleurs. La puissante De Beers a dû plier sous la pression des associations et la filière diamantaire, gouvernements et industriels réunis, a mis un peu d’ordre dans ses tablettes même si tout n’est pas encore brillant-brillant.
Qu’en est-il de nos gourmettes, alliance, collier, piercing (il en faut pour tous les goûts) ? D’où provient l’or qui pend à mon cou ? Une autre responsabilité me pend-t-elle au nez ?
Hyperconsommatrice de mercure et de cyanure, l’extraction de l’or génère des tonnes de déchets toxiques. L’exploitation minière artisanale contribue au déboisement, à la dégradation des sols, à la pollution de l’air par le monoxyde de carbone, du sol et de l’eau… N’en jetez plus ?!!! Ben si : sur le plan sanitaire, elle peut engendrer des maladies respiratoires par l’inhalation de gaz et poussière…
Community Energy Systems is a nonprofit 501c3 organization chartered in Illinois in Sangamon County. As such we are dependent on public donations for our continued existence. We also use Adsense as a fundraiser. Please click on the ads that you see on this page, on our main page and on our Bulletin Board (Refrigerator Magnets) and you will be raising money for CES. We say a heartfelt THANK YOU to all who do.
60 Minutes: Former Chief of National Intelligence Says U.S. Unprepared for Cyber Attacks
“We know that cyber intruders have probed our electrical grid, and that in other countries cyber attacks have plunged entire cities into darkness,” the president said.
President Obama didn’t say which country had been plunged into darkness, but a half a dozen sources in the military, intelligence, and private security communities have told us the president was referring to Brazil.
Several prominent intelligence sources confirmed that there were a series of cyber attacks in Brazil: one north of Rio de Janeiro in January 2005 that affected three cities and tens of thousands of people, and another, much larger event beginning on Sept. 26, 2007.
That one in the state of Espirito Santo affected more than three million people in dozens of cities over a two-day period, causing major disruptions. In Vitoria, the world’s largest iron ore producer had seven plants knocked offline, costing the company $7 million. It is not clear who did it or what the motive was.
But the people who do these sorts of things are no longer teenagers making mischief. They’re now likely to be highly trained soldiers with the Chinese army or part of an organized crime group in Russia, Europe or the Americas.
“They can disrupt critical infrastructure, wipe databases. We know they can rob banks. So, it’s a much bigger and more serious threat,” explained Jim Lewis, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Lewis led a group that prepared a major report on cyber security for President Obama.
“What was it that made the government begin to take this seriously?” Kroft asked.
“In 2007 we probably had our electronic Pearl Harbor. It was an espionage Pearl Harbor,” Lewis said. “Some unknown foreign power, and honestly, we don’t know who it is, broke into the Department of Defense, to the Department of State, the Department of Commerce, probably the Department of Energy, probably NASA. They broke into all of the high tech agencies, all of the military agencies, and downloaded terabytes of information.”
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Today it’s not only possible, all of that has actually happened, plus a lot more we don’t even know about.
It’s why President Obama has made cyber war defense a top national priority and why some people are already saying that the next big war is less likely to begin with a bang than a blackout.
RIO DE JANEIRO – Brazil emerged early Wednesday from a widespread power outage that plunged its major cities and at least nine states into darkness for hours, prompting security fears and concern from residents about another black eye for a country hosting the 2016 Olympic Games.
Power went out for more than two hours in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and several other major cities, affecting millions of people, after transmission problems knocked one of the world’s biggest hydroelectric dams offline. Airport operations were hindered and subways ground to a halt.
All of neighboring Paraguay was plunged into the dark, but for less than a half hour.
Brazilian authorities blamed storms that took down power lines and towers, causing a domino effect that rippled across the region.
Lights twinkled back on along Rio’s Copacabana beach, in South America‘s largest city of Sao Paulo and in Paraguay‘s sleepy capital of Asuncion. But some traffic lights were still out in both Rio and Sao Paulo and traffic officials were expecting drivers to face difficulties the rest of the day, according to local media.
AFX News Limited South Africa hit by power outages 02.19.2006, 05:59 AM
JOHANNESBURG (AFX) – Parts of southwestern South Africa as well as its largest city, Johannesburg, were hit by power failures Sunday, disrupting households and bringing trains to a halt, local news reports said.
Power supply was restored to some parts of the Western Cape province which was without any power in the early hours of Sunday, power utility ESKOM spokesman Fanie Zulu said.
‘We are in the process of checking interaction between the national control and the City of Cape Town control room. They are increasing their supply,’ Zulu told the local SAPA news agency.
‘There are no trains running in the province until the power is restored,’ said Metrorail spokeswoman Riana Jacobs added.
Officials blamed the cuts on faults within the transmission lines because of misty conditions and residual pollution from fires which had recently raged in the province.
Areas in Johannesburg were also hit by power cuts, knocking out traffic lights and disrupting households, SABC radio news reported.
Short power outages seen in Mindanao By Lino De La Cruz (The Philippine Star) Updated September 18, 2009 12:00 AM
Iligan City, Philippines – Short rotational power outages are expected in some areas in Mindanao as four hydroelectric plants and two independent power producers undertake repairs and preventive maintenance work this week.
Thus, the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) said it has asked power utility firms and electric cooperatives in Mindanao to set up a load reduction plan amid the situation.
Eugene Bicar, NGCP-Mindanao systems operation head, said the power plants have been temporarily shut down for preventive maintenance work.
He said requests have been made to power utilities and electric cooperatives in Mindanao to drop some of their feeders to address the generation problem and prevent overloading of transmission lines.
Power supply is now limited as the Agus 1 (unit 2) in Marawi City, Agus 5 (unit 1) in Iligan City, Agus 2 (unit 1) in Lanao del Sur, and the Pulangi hydroelectric plant in Bukidnon are now temporarily shut downAlso in the same situation are the Western Mindanao Power Corp. in Zamboanga City and the STEAG coal-fired power plant in Villanueva, Misamis Oriental.
“Short rotational (power outages) in some areas in Mindanao are expected during the peak hours from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. daily based on actual system condition until curtailment is lifted,” Bicar said.
However, he said steps are being made to correct the problems of the power plants as soon as possible so that power supply in the Mindanao grid is normalized with a comfortable level of generation reserves.
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What? And you think there are power outages in Indonesia? Comeon I don’t even have to Google or Bing that.
In Oregon alone hunters kill over 94,000 Ruffled Grouse in 10 years…now on to other news
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Continuing with my meditation on “living off the land”, (and my life a*s a google whore) there are many passive ways to use the environment to our advantage. One of these is solar water heaters. Hell I remember when they were called solar water preheaters because the utility companies were petrified that everyone would have them.
China leads solar home revolution
By Ryan RutkowskiGazing across the Chinese urban cityscape, one quickly notices many strange tubular devices dotting the rooftops of many residential buildings. These are solar water heaters.Solar water heaters rank among the world’s fastest-growing applications of solar thermal technology. According to the WorldWatch institute, the solar thermal heating sector expanded worldwide in 2007 at its highest rate since 1995, up 19 gigawatts of thermal equivalent (GWth) to 147 GWth total capacity. Solar thermal energy harnessed for domestic water heating is the primary application of this technology, accounting for 86% of all installations in 2009.
China is the world’s largest market for solar water heating (SWH). Since the 1990s, China has blossomed with an increase in annual
production to 114.1 million square meters in 2007 from 0.5 million square meters in 1991, accounting for two thirds of global output. According to “The China Greentech Report 2009”, the country has the world’s largest installed base of solar waterheaters, at over 125 million square meters, with one in 10 families such devices.
In 2007, SWH firms in China generated sales of 32 billion yuan (US$470 million). The country’s annual production of solar water heater systems is twice that of Europe and four times that of the United States.
Moreover, China has become a global leader in the manufacturing of components for solar water heater systems. According to “The China Greentech Report 2009”, over 95% of core solar water heating technology patents are held by Chinese firms. In 2005, China produced over 90% of the world’s evacuated tubes, 70% of the world’s borosilicate glass, and more than 90% of the world’s “getter” – reactive materials used for removing traces of gas from vacuum systems.
In recent years, China has begun exporting its SWH technology. In 2007, the sector’s exports grew 28%, with a total value of US$65 million, the equipment going to 50 countries and territories in Europe, the United States, Africa and Southeast Asia. China’s leading export companies are Jiangsu Sunrain New Energy Group, Shandong Linuo Solar Energy Group and Beijing Tsinghua Solar.
Solar water heater systems can be seen across China, from the largest urban metropolitan areas to the smallest rural hamlets. The systems are most common on residential buildings in urban areas, while 90% of the systems are used in single households and 10% in schools, hotels and restaurants.
Altogether, over 30 million households in China use the systems. Southwestern Yunnan province, an area known for abundant sunshine and consistent year-round temperatures, has adopted widespread use of solar water heater systems, with almost all residential buildings in cities and rural areas equipped with them.
A combination of low production costs and significant government support has contributed to the rise of the systems. A standard household system can be set up for just over 2,000 yuan (US$294), compared with 1,800 yuan for gas and as low as 500 yuan for comparable electric water heaters. However, every cubic meter of natural gas costs about 1.7 yuan and every kilowatt hour of mains electricity costs about 0.44 yuan, compared with no cost for a SWH system – a significant savings over time, especially in areas with no access to natural gas and with abundant solar energy.
According to a study by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, SWHs were the most economical domestic hot water system compared with diesel oil boilers, gas boilers, or electric water heaters. The annual operating costs of SWHs in Shanghai were 70% less than electric water heaters.
On January 1, 2006, China passed a revolutionary renewable energy law to spur local governments to support the development of renewable energy projects across provinces. In 2007, the National Development and Reform Council’s Medium and Long-term Development Plan for Renewable Energy in China called for an increase in the total installed area for SWH systems to 150 million square meters by 2010 and 300 million square meters by 2020 – of this 100 million square meters will be in rural areas.
At present, the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone next to Hong Kong, eastern Nanjing, Zhengzhou and Xiamen, and Shijiazhuang near Beijing, are among cities that make SWH systems compulsory on newly built and rebuilt residential buildings at 12 stories or below. In Shanghai, the local government is also pushing for an increase in the solar collecting area.
Three types of solar SWH systems are in use in China: vacuum tube collectors, flat-plate collectors, and combined storage collectors. The vacuum tube collectors are the most prevalent, making up 88% of the market in 2004, compared with 11% for flat-plate collectors, and less than 1% for combined storage collectors. New models often have electrical heaters inside the water tank to ensure efficiency in all weather conditions. According to a study by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, under weather conditions in Shanghai, the annual solar collecting efficiency of flat panel SWH systems is about 36-40%.
The SWH manufacturing market is highly fragmented, with more than 5,000 producers throughout the country. A lack of comprehensive standards for components and manufacturing and local protectionism has kept down the costs of entry for firms.
In April this year, the Ministry of Commerce announced a “Home Electronics to Countryside” program to encourage the growth of SWH systems in rural areas with a 13% subsidy on the cost of buying a system for rural residents. Many experts view this plan as a tool to encourage consolidation in the industry through adoption of more rigid standards. Only 92 of the 133 companies that placed a bid for the program were selected.
Shandong is the world production center for SWHs, based on measured area of concentrated heat vacuum tubes, with over 100 million square meters a year and 387 manufacturers. Of China’s 30 leading makers of the products with over 10 million yuan in production value, 10 are based in the province, including some of the largest SWH producers, such as Himin Solar Energy Group, Shandong Sangle Solar Energy and Linuo Paradigma Solar Energy.
Dezhou city, home to Himin Solar, boasts that 90% of households there use SWHs and that the streets are lit with solar-powered lights.
Recently, Jiangsu province joined the drive into SWH manufacturing. Of the 92 companies selected for the home electronics to the countryside program, 15 were from the province, including Jiangsu Huayang Solar Energy Heater, Jiangsu Sunrain Solar Energy and Jiangsu Sunshore Solar Energy Industry.
Jiangsu Huayang has filed for 150 independent patents and exports products to the US, Germany, Italy, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.
The industry’s growth is attracting overseas interest. On September 17, Milwaukee-based, AO Smith Corp acquired a controlling stake in Tianlong Holding, one of China’s leading water purification companies. AO Smith is a world leader in residential and commercial water heating equipment and is already the second-biggest maker of water heaters in China, posting sales revenue of US$2.3 billion in 2008.
China’s rapid adoption of SWH technology will help counter the country’s dependence on fossil fuels. In 2004, SWH units already provided 12% of China’s renewable energy, second only to hydropower. According to the government’s mid-to-long term plan, China could save 20 million tonnes of coal by installing a total of 150 million square meters of SWHs by 2010.
According to “The China Greentech Report 2009”, the market size for green technology in China could reach up to 15% of gross domestic product by 2013. Clearly, this is not only an opportunity for foreign firms to jump on the bandwagon of a Chinese market with astronomical growth potential, it is also a golden opportunity for Chinese firms to gain a foothold in the rapidly developing renewable energy markets in Europe and North America. China’s solar revolution is well underway, and will not be limited by national borders.
Ryan Rutkowski is a master’s student studying international economics at Johns Hopkins University – Nanjing University Center for Chinese-American Studies.
Solar Collector or Solar Water Heater is a device that absorbs thermal energy from the sun and converts it into usable heat. The heat is normally absorbed by water, or a freeze resistant water mix, which can then be used to supplement hot water heating, space heating and even space cooling via use of an absorption chiller or dessicant cooler technology.
It is true. Even though stories about disappearing honey bees, or even Colony Collapse Disorder have appeared on 60 minutes, Scientific America and even NatGeo. There is very little truth to it. It is largely a North American and European commercial pollination problem which would never really effect food production much. If they worked me as hard as they do the commercial bees I’d fly away too. My Pawpaws are pollinated by flies so I don’t really care. If you don’t believe me read this:
But this and yesterday’s post got me to thinking about eating simply and it furthers my meditation on living off the land. Humans have come to eat so complicatedly and chemically. Did you ever wonder why Lay’s Potato Chips claims that”you can’t eat just one” and they are probably right? I am no extremist veggan or anything approaching one. There are 200,000 deer in Illinois and if oil collapsed tomorrow and with it civilization I would go shoot one the day after. I don’t even know if the children still trick or treat for Unicef but in that spirit let’s start with Plump-i-nut factories in Africa:
UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman receives flowers from children upon her arrival at the new Plumpy’nut factory in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
By Indrias Getachew
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, 21 February 2007 – UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman inaugurated Ethiopia’s first Plumpy’nut therapeutic food factory in Addis Ababa yesterday.
The inauguration marks a joint venture between UNICEF, US-based private donor and businesswoman Amy Robbins and the Hilina Enriched Foods Processing Centre.
Plumpy’nut is a high-protein and high-energy, peanut-based paste used for the treatment of severely undernourished children. An estimated 1.5 million children in Ethiopia are severely undernourished. At full capacity, Hilina Enriched Foods will produce up to 12 tons of the paste per day.
“Today as we open the doors of the fourth, and largest, factory in Africa that will produce Plumpy’nut, we are taking a step in the right direction in addressing the issue of malnutrition,” said Ms. Veneman.
Generous solution
In 2005, the Robbins family donated $1.3 million to UNICEF to allow the purchase and import of 267 tons of Plumpy’nut to Ethiopia.
Formulated by French scientist Andre Briend in 1999, Plumpy’nut has been used to save children’s lives in major emergency situations in Darfur, Niger and Malawi.
From left: Philanthopist Amy Robbins, Minister of Trade and Industries Ato Girma Birru and the State Minister for Agriculture at the inauguration of the Plumpy’nut factory in Addis Ababa.
Plumpy’nut requires no preparation or special supervision, so an untrained adult – such as a parent – can deliver it to an undernourished child at home, allowing governments to reduce the amount of money spent on therapeutic feeding stations. The paste has a two-year shelf life when unopened and stays fresh even after opening.
Though Plumpy’nut is relatively inexpensive and easy to transport, Ms. Robbins discovered that huge costs were incurred from its importation and that limited capacity at the French plant made it difficult to ensure timely food supplies from Europe.
To solve the problem, her family foundation donated $340,000 towards investment in the needed equipment to manufacture Plumpy’nut within Ethiopia.
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Everyone knows that factory farming of animals pioneered here in the Corporate US of A is dangerous to the health of all involved including the humans. Everyone knows that eating cow flesh is probably not a good idea, at least everyday or even 2 or 3 times a week. Goats, sheep, fowl and pigs are much better alternatives.
The most recent genetic analysis[5] confirms the archaeological evidence that the AnatolianZagros are the likely origin of almost all domestic goats today. Neolithic farmers began to keep them for easy access to milk and meat, primarily, also for their dung, which was used as fuel and their bones, hair, and sinew for clothing, building, and tools.[1] The earliest remnants of domesticated goats dating 10,000 before present are found in Ganj Dareh in Iranian Kurdistan. Domestic goats were generally kept in herds that wandered on hills or other grazing areas, often tended by goatherds who were frequently children or adolescents, similar to the more widely known shepherd. These methods of herding are still used today.
Historically, goat hide has been used for water and wine bottles in both traveling and transporting wine for sale. It has also been used to produce parchment
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Not to mention that the flesh is wonderful and so are the milk and cheese. They will eat just about anything and everyone should have at least 2. Again it is the GROWTH model that destroys the equilibrium of the planet. Simple is laughed at. People who juice their foods live much long because their foods are fresh and uncooked.
Jack LaLane should know he has been at it for years:
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Our GROWTH system even prevents or even worse obliterates local options. When I found out about Pawpaws I was thoroughly amazed:
Cultivation and uses
Asimina triloba is often called prairie banana because of its banana-like creamy texture and flavor.
The pawpaw is native to shady, rich bottom lands, where it often forms a dense undergrowth in the forest. Where it dominates a tract it appears as a thicket of small slender trees, whose great leaves are borne so close together at the ends of the branches, and which cover each other so symmetrically, that the effect is to give a peculiar imbricated appearance to the tree.[1]
Although it is a delicious and nutritious fruit, it has never been cultivated on the scale of apples and peaches, primarily because only frozen fruit will store or ship well. It is also difficult to transplant because of fragile hairy root tentacles that tend to break off unless a cluster of moist soil is retained on the root mass. Cultivars are propagated by chip budding or whip grafting.
In recent years the pawpaw has attracted renewed interest, particularly among organic growers, as a native fruit which has few to no pests, and which therefore requires no pesticide use for cultivation. The shipping and storage problem has largely been addressed by freezing. Among backyard gardeners it also is gaining in popularity because of the appeal of fresh fruit and because it is relatively low maintenance once planted. The pulp is used primarily in baked dessert recipes and for juicing fresh pawpaw drink or drink mixtures (pawpaw, pineapple, banana, lime, lemon and orange tea mix). In many recipes calling for bananas, pawpaw can be used with volumetric equivalency.
But really the place to start with all of this is to pick your foods carefully. Find a butcher and get to know him or her. Look around and find local growers that you can trust. When you have to go to a modern grocery store go there with a certain amount of fear and suspicion.
OK OK so he got Y@K (oh Y2K) wrong, he is an apoplectic apocalypse dude where everything turns out badly, and he is probably anti-arabic. Nonetheles he writes with a cogent powerful logic. I wish that he had a little bit better appreciation for the power of the Sun however.
This just hot off the presses and then more about him:
In our history, the American nation committed obvious sins against select groups of people, and we’ve paid bitterly for some of that. But now it’s our sins against the land itself that threaten to sink the USA as a viable enterprise.
It’s odd, that in his otherwise excellent blow-by-blow account (“Eight Days,” in the Sept 21 New Yorker Magazine) of the September 2008 Wall Street meltdown that left Lehman dead, and AIG croaking in a ditch, and the banking system in general functionally crippled, reporter James B. Stewart never got around to really describing the cause of it all — namely, the on-the-ground material catastrophe of American suburbia.
It was the worthlessness of the tradable securitized debt associated with all those overpriced (and overvalued) chipboard and vinyl houses, smeared recklessly over the American landscape, that started all the trouble in the first place. And it is our inability to come to grips with that underlying catastrophe that prolongs the resolution of the still-florid banking crisis — since the federal government is doing everything possible to prop up the failed capital equation of terminal suburbia, and to deny the obsolescence of that version of the American Dream and all the mechanisms for delivering it.
The suburban project was not a conspiracy by the likes of Robert Moses, Walt Disney, Frank Lloyd Wright, and President Eisenhower to produce a living arrangement with no future. It was the emergent, self-organizing result of special circumstances in a particular time and place: post World War Two America, with an immense supply of cheap oil, cheap land, and the industrial capacity to churn out all the necessary components for a car-dependent development pattern. Suburbia was spawned out of a couple of persistent themes in American cultural history: 1.) that cities and city life were no good; 2.) and that the romance of settling the wilderness could be reenacted, at great profit, in all that space beyond the towns and cities. It would be silly to deny the appeal of this arrangement at its inception. By the end of WW II, city life in the popular imagination was reduced to one potently awful image: Ralph Kramden’s apartment in “The Honeymooners” TV show.
There had to be something better than that. Suburbia was engineered as the antidote to the Kramden’s apartment: country-living-for-everybody. The evacuation of the cities to the new outlands proceeded as relentlessly as the landings at Normandy. It wasn’t until the program was well underway that the self-destructive essence of it became obvious — that every new housing subdivision killed the original rural character of the land, with the result that suburban life quickly became a cartoon of country living in a cartoon of a country house in a cartoon of the country. With additional layer-on-layer of, first, the shopping in the form of highway strips, then malls, along with the office “parks,” these places elaborated themselves into a kind of cancer-of-the-landscape, a chronic and expensive condition that Americans had no choice but to live with, because of the monumental investments they had already made in it. The discontents it produced lent it to psychological depression and dark humor, just as chronic illness does. But we were stuck with it.
Meanwhile, all the machinery of culture and politics made it impossible to construct anything differently. The exquisitely fine-tuned planning-and-zoning codes generated by the thousands of town boards mandated a suburban outcome everywhere — with plenty of help from the DOT traffic engineers, the fire marshals, and the even the mandarins of academia who trained all these professionals. As a natural consequence of all this, the disinvestment in cities — especially the older cities of the industrial heartland — continued remorsely until it seemed as if the Second World War had taken place in St. Louis and Cleveland.
This mode of behavior persisted through the first, short-lived oil scarcity tremors of the 1970s. It was so completely embedded in the popular imagination that it had become the baseline American identity. The suburban project caught a second wind in the 1990s, when the last great non-OPEC oil fields of the North Sea, Alaska, and Siberia nullified the grip of the Islamic cartel for while, and sent the price of oil down to $11-a-barrel. Ironically, it was during those years that the warnings of “peak oil” first circulated beyond the geology offices, and it was clear to anyone who reflected on the connections that the project of suburbia was doomed.
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He goes on to point out that there is no economy LEFT in the US anymore. Besides food, which has been corporatized there is nothing left in the US to make money with. The manufacturing jobs were sent overseas.
Kunstler was born in New York City to Jewish parents,[1] who divorced when he was eight.[2] His father was a middleman in the diamond trade.[1] Kunstler spent most of his childhood with his mother and stepfather, a publicist for Broadway shows.[1] While spending summers at a boys’ camp in New Hampshire, he became acquainted with the small town ethos that would later permeate many of his works. In 1966 he graduated from New York City’s High School of Music & Art, and then attended the State University of New York at Brockport where he majored in Theater.
After college Kunstler worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone. In 1975, he began writing books and lecturing full-time. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York and was formerly married to the children’s author Jennifer Armstrong.
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You can find out more than you ever really cared to at:
Interestingly here is the part that Energy Bulletins left out…I wonder why?
Clusterfuck Nation Comment on Current Events by the Author of “The Long Emergency”
By James Howard Kunstler
on September 21, 2009 6:34 AM
In our history, the American nation committed obvious sins against select groups of people, and we’ve paid bitterly for some of that.But now it’s our sins against the land itself that threaten to sink the USA as a viable enterprise. It’s odd, that in his otherwise excellent blow-by-blow account (“Eight Days,” in the Sept 21 New Yorker Magazine) of the September 2008 Wall Street meltdown that left Lehman dead, and AIG croaking in a ditch, and the banking system in general functionally crippled, reporter James B. Stewart never got around to really describing the cause of it all — namely, the on-the-ground material catastrophe of American suburbia. It was the worthlessness of the tradable securitized debt associated with all those overpriced (and overvalued) chipboard and vinyl houses, smeared recklessly over the American landscape, that started all the trouble in the first place.And it is our inability to come to grips with that underlying catastrophe that prolongs the resolution of the still-florid banking crisis — since the federal government is doing everything possible to prop up the failed capital equation of terminal suburbia, and to deny the obsolescence of that version of the American Dream and all the mechanisms for delivering it. The suburban project was not a conspiracy
