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Category Archives: Energy Tough Love Blog

Energy Tough Love Blog – A weblog from Community Energy Systems

Better Battery Storage – Once you make electricity you have to put it somewhere

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I have written so much about generation lately, that I forgot to say anything about storage. At least in awhile. The article below describes some progress being made on this front.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/13/12166824/facecbook-smartphone-testing-lab-battery-life-prineville-data-center

Inside the secret lab where Facebook tries to save your battery life

Deep inside Facebook’s very first data center, located in a sprawling facility in the hills of Prineville, OR, lies a series of about 60 server racks. Each one houses 32 smartphones, all of which are running a version of one of Facebook’s many mobile apps. The company calls this setup the Mobile Device Lab, and it’s designed to test Facebook’s software on older phones to discover whether any bit of a new code, no matter how minor, results in a dip in performance or poorer battery life. For those smartphone owners who tote around a two- or even three-year-old device — and users in developing countries purchasing lower-cost devices for the first time — the lab is the very reason Facebook is still a viable home screen staple.

Antoine Reversat, part of Facebook’s production engineering team, opens one of the racks for a group of reporters during its first Oregon data center tour in almost three years this week. Behind a large black metal door sit 32 iPhone 5C devices all in the process of either scrolling through the News Feed, testing various operations’ lag on battery consumption, or rebooting to resume an identical state before running yet another test. In each server row sits more than a dozen racks, some holding devices as old as the iPhone 4 and others housing newer Google Nexus 5s. In total, Facebook has almost 2,000 handsets used to tell developers when they’ve screwed something up, and whether that degradation is only noticeable on an older phone.

With Facebook serving more than 1.65 billion users around the world, taking into account every variation in device type, mobile operating system, and network condition has become an increasingly complex operation. Entire companies have built robust operations around testing mobile software in similar fashion, and some of those startups have been scooped up by big-name competitors. In 2014, Google bought San Francisco-based mobile app tester Appurify. Facebook’s engineers, on the other hand, figured the company could do the job itself, especially considering it had the computing power and server rack space at its expansive Oregon data center.

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Go there and read. It is a highly technical article and did i say long. More next week.

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Recycle – It’s the American way

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I have posted many articles about recycling. This is a different take on it by guest writer Jessica Kane. Enjoy.

www.texasinspector.com/2016/06/

5 Things You Should Stop Throwing Away

Jun 24, 16 • Advice
Jessica Kane is a professional blogger who writes for many onlike websites.

5 Things You Should Stop Throwing Away 

 

Wastefulness has increased in modern times because consumers can find low-cost, disposable products made from inexpensive, easy-to-manufacture materials. These products harm the environment in a variety of ways:

 

– Waste causes the destruction of forests and fields to create larger landfills.

– Biodegradable items in landfills decompose to create methane and other greenhouse gases.

– Burning trash creates harmful smoke that pollutes clean air.

– Animals eat plastics and plastic breakdown releases toxic chemicals into the ground and water supplies.

 

Garbage bags, waste disposal trucks and landfills often contain items that people can effortlessly recycle, upcycle or reuse. You simply need to rethink how you deal with trash:

 

Fruit and Vegetable Waste

 

Moldy or damaged fruit and vegetable waste is 100 percent biodegradable. In nature, waste plants feed microorganisms, insects and animals and decompose into plant soil nutrients. Instead of tossing whole fruits and vegetables or cuttings into the trash, make nutrient-rich composted fertilizer for your potted plants and garden. Drill a few out-gassing holes into the sides of a sturdy lidded container and then fill the container with starter soil, earthworms and leaves. Shred fruit and vegetable waste into small pieces and then add it to the container

– See more at: http://www.texasinspector.com/2016/06/5-things-you-should-stop-throwing-away/#sthash.mYWRhnbu.dpuf

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Organized Crime And Pollution – These people will traffic in anything

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I had originally planned on Posting about Obama’s new environmental goals, but I couldn’t find the article. I had been offered a guest blogger’s article about recycling. However I had been wanting to read this article about how industry was using organized crime to dump toxic crap into the environment, so here it is.

http://mosaicscience.com/story/how-mafia-causing-cancer

 

24 June 2016

 

How the mafia is causing cancer

When doctors in rural Italy began to see a surge in cancer cases, they were baffled. Then they made the link with industrial waste being dumped by local crime syndicates. Ian Birrell learns about the tragic consequences.
A few days before I visited the rather scruffy Hospital of Saint Anna and Saint Sebastian in Caserta, a boy aged 11 arrived complaining of headaches. Doctors feared the worst – and sure enough, the case was rapidly diagnosed as another child with brain cancer. Some of these young patients arrive in agonising pain, others mystified by falling over all the time; they do not know lethal tumours are swelling up inside their heads. Yet more turn up with cancer in their blood, their bones, their bladders. There are so many cases not all can be treated in the hospitals of Campania, a largely rural region of southern Italy.It was too early to provide a prognosis for the boy with the brain cancer, let alone to offer real comfort to his distraught family. Yet in a town where doctors used to rarely come across a child with cancer, never mind brain cancer, they now see these traumatic cases crop up almost every month. Too many young patients are ending up dead, some barely out the womb but with bodies riddled with disease. Then there are all the women getting breast cancer unusually early, the men with lung cancer despite never smoking, the children born with Down’s syndrome despite the comparatively young age of their mothers.

So why is this happening in an area north of Naples known as the ‘Triangle of Death’? The answer, locals believe, can almost certainly be found in places such as an old quarry three miles away by the historic town of Maddaloni, which I visited with an energetic 57-year-old youth worker named Enzo Tosti. As we drove there, he told me he was having treatment to counter the high levels of dioxins found in his blood five months earlier. “My wife works for the hospital as a radiologist and she is very concerned,” he said. “I thought about leaving for my health and going to live somewhere else, but where would I go? This is my land.”

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Go there and read, read, and read. More next week.

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Tesla Tries To Buy SolarCity – This could be a very good thing

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This could be a huge boost for both the solar panel and the automobile industry. It could finally show a way to wean the world off gasoline as a fuel and on to clean electricity. Then again it could just crash and burn. I think it is a good thing. I hope for the best.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/22/musk-tesla-solarcity-energy-electric-car-solar

Tesla

Musk’s Tesla makes a bid for Musk’s SolarCity energy company

Electric car company attempts to acquire solar panel seller to create a Silicon Valley one-stop-shop for clean energy for car and home

and agencies

Elon Musk’s Tesla electric car company has made an offer to buy Musk’s solar power company, SolarCity, for as much as $2.8bn in stock in an attempt to make a one-stop-shop for cleaner energy.

SolarCity, for which Musk is both chairman and its largest shareholder, is the market leader in residential solar panel installations in the US, but has about $6.24bn in liabilities, including debt.

Musk described the deal as a “no-brainer”, saying: “Instead of making three trips to a house to put in a car charger and solar panels and battery pack, you can integrate that into a single visit. It’s an obvious thing to do.”

If the deal goes through, SolarCity will adopt the Tesla brand and sell its solar panels alongside Tesla’s PowerWall home batteries to store electricity created during the day for when it is needed at night.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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I AM Really High On Solar Power – I may even get giddy

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This article claims that solar power could be as cheap as 4 cents a kilowatt. It speculates that solar power might even reach the 3 cent level. I have doubts about those prices, but it is good news however low it goes.

http://fortune.com/2016/06/13/solar-to-get-crazy-cheap/

Solar Is Going to Get Ridiculously Cheap

Costs of the clean energy tech will keep falling over the next decade.

Solar will become the cheapest source to produce power in many countries over the next 15 years, according to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Part of the cheap solar power will be unleashed because the cost of installing solar panels at big solar farms and on rooftops will drop 60% to an estimated average of around four cents per kilowatt hour by 2040, the report said. That’s cheaper than coal and natural gas power in many regions.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Chile Is A Solar Success – There are some kinks in the system

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But I am betting that those kinks will be worked out. They do need create a Southern Grid and really grow the system to take care of a growing population. They also will need to plan for a growing industrial base.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a21228/chile-solar-energy-surplus/

Chile Generates So Much Solar Power That It Just Gives the Extra Away

It sounds great, but it’s actually bad news for the energy industry.

Chile has so much solar energy that the price of solar frequently drops to zero, which is great news for consumers but frustrating for energy companies and investors.

Under President Michelle Bachelet, Chile has been aggressively expanding its solar energy generation, adding 371 megawatts of solar power last year alone. However, construction of new energy infrastructure has lagged behind, with no national power grid and many unserviced areas. This leads to an overabundance of power in certain areas while others get left out.

 This overabundance has led to the spot price, or current price, of solar dropping to zero over a hundred times so far this year through April. Bloomberg reports that this number is set to beat 2015’s total, which saw 192 such price drops for the whole year.
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Go there and read. More next week.

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Gasoline Consumption Skyrockets – Climate change does too

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It is depressing sometimes. You thing people have got. The climate is warming because we throw carbon and other green house gases in the air. Then oil and gasoline gets cheap and people go to over consuming. Come on, use green energy instead.

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/12082015/americans-cheap-fuel-gas-emissions-rise-climate-suffers

Americans Are Fueling Up Cheaply, and the Climate Suffers

So much for the idea that American gasoline use topped out in the last decade.

Lower oil prices and the improving economy have sparked an increase in fuel use, road travel and vehicle emissions. It puts an emphatic end to the notion that better fuel economy and fewer active drivers would shrink demand for gasoline in the U.S. from what was thought to be its peak in 2007.

That’s bad news for the climate. Processing crude oil and burning gasoline send huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and are major contributors to global warming. The increase in those emissions comes at an inopportune time. World leaders expect the U.S. to lead the way on emission reductions as negotiations continue toward a global climate treaty in December.

After falling for five straight years, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from gasoline consumption rose 1.4 percent in 2013, followed by a less than 1 percent increase in 2014 to 1.07 billion metric tons, according to the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA).

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Are European Windows Better – Yes they are but it is hard to tell

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There are some that say yes. There are some they say no. But if you read to the end the Europeans window are better.

http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/qa-spotlight/do-europeans-make-better-windows-we-do

Do Europeans Make Better Windows Than We Do?

Differences in testing protocols yield different U-factors, but do European manufacturers have a ‘secret sauce’?

Posted on Oct 15 2012 by Scott Gibson
It should come as no surprise that Europe, home of the Passivhaus standard, produces some outstanding windows. Some builders of high-efficiency houses in North America turn to European window manufacturers for their glazing, even though some U.S. and Canadian producers also offer high-performance products of their own.Is there a way to compare the performance data on windows from these two sources? That’s what Steve Young, now planning a Passive House in Climate Zone 5, would like to know.

“I have read many blogs and Q&A pages from this web site and I am still somewhat confused about European windows,” Young writes in Q&A post at GreenBuildingAdvisor

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Illinois Senate SB 1585 Is A Bad Bill – It is worse than the original bill

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The original BAD idea behind this bill was that Excelon’s Nukes were not profitable so they needed a subsidy from the State of Illinois or they would have to shut down. That subsidy would come from including the Nukes as part of Illinois’ Clean Energy Portfolio. Yah right, like Nukes are a clean source of energy. But this 2016 version rolls Clean Coal, Renewable Energy and Nuclear Power into the same package. Just how bad is this Bill? There is no such thing as Clean Coal.

http://www.illinoispeoplesaction.org/uploads/1/2/6/2/12620849/update-_kill_sb_1585.pdf

HELP US KILL EXELON’S BAILOUT BILL!
Less than a week ago, Exelon– the owner of Illinois’ nuclear power industry and one of the largest energy companies in the world– introduced a new bill to the Illinois Senate. SB 1585 is disguised as a “new generation” energy plan for our state, but is nothing more than a giant bailout for Exelon.
To make things worse, Exelon is using their energy monopoly to strongarm our lawmakers, threatening to close 2 nuclear power plants if the bill doesn’t pass by May 31st.  SB1585 takes tax dollars out of our
hands, and puts them straight into the pockets of Exelon.
Our tax dollar should not be used to keep dangerous nuclear energy in business. Instead, our tax dollars should be invested in the clean energy future that our state and planet needs!
BEAT BACK THE EXELON SHAKEDOWN!
3 Things YOU can do THIS WEEK!
1. Electronically
Submit a Witness Slip AGAINST this bad bill!

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Go there and read. More important, do everything they say and show up at the State Capitol if you can. More next week.

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Radioactive Animals And Plants – I did not know how widespread they are

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I am so used to thinking about radiation as dangerous and creepy, that this article comletely caught me off guard. How about you?

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-radioactive-animals-become-tools-pests-and-political-statements

How Radioactive Animals Become Tools, Pests and Political Statements

Far from Chernobyl, turtles, rabbits and cows make nuclear cleanups an educational mess.

by Cara Giaimo

May 11, 2016

In the late 1970s, a worker at South Carolina’s Savannah River Site nuclear reservation peered into a seepage basin and spotted a small, out-of-place turtle. Scooping it out of the nuclear waste, the worker toted his new charge to a nearby ecology lab, where he figured they’d know what to do with it.

As he walked in the lab door, a radioactivity counter began beeping. The lab technician tested the mud on the worker’s shoes, figuring he’d tracked in some of the site’s contaminated muck. When the shoes came up clear, the confused technician tested further. After a few more swipes, the culprit emerged: It was the turtle.

Though this was the first radioactive turtle found at the Savannah River Site, it was far from an anomaly—there or elsewhere. Across the world, such creatures scurry, swim and fly among us. Unlike popular representations might lead us believe, most of them lack grotesque deformities, special abilities, or weird proclivities for pizza. Instead, like that turtle, many of them are totally healthy and happy—living relatively normal lives and, unless we try to eat them, posing little direct threat to humans.

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Go there and read. It is fascinating. More next week.

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