Sometimes an event is just so thick with symbolism that just reciting the facts seems cliche. Case in point: After experiencing the biggest nuclear disaster of the new century, Japan is building the world's largest wind farm—right off the coast where the husk of the Fukushima plant still simmers.
Right now, Japan is scrambling to find enough alternative energy sources to pick up the slack from the fleet of nuclear power plants it shut down in the wake of the meltdown. It's going on a renewable energy binge, it's importing coal, and it's implementing impressive energy efficiency measures to lower demand. But it's not enough, yet.
So the government announced a major step forward—ambitious plans to invest heavily in offshore wind power. The new plant to be built off the shore of Fukushima will consist of 143 giant floating turbines, and boasts a capacity of 1 gigawatt of electricity—that's nearly twice the power of the planet's second-biggest turbine, which can currently be found in England.
To put that in perspective, 1 gigwatt is enough to power between 750,000 and 1,000,000 homes. 1 gigawatt is the total capacity of all the solar panels installed in California as of 2011. 1 gigawatt is some serious capacity.
Furthermore, Japan's big bad wind farm will be built using innovative new technology that allows them to float rather than being attached directly to the ocean floor.
Instead of anchoring each turbine directly to the ocean floor, the plan is to mount them on floating steel frames that will be anchored to the continental shelf below. To keep them upright, ballast will be used underneath. The plans also call for using 2 megawatt turbines, each standing 200 meters high.
And it turns out that the choice of location wasn't merely symbolic, either: “The site was chosen due to the existing infrastructure that had been used to transport power from the Daiichi plant before its destruction,” Bob Yirka writes.
Even so, the symbolism pervades. Out with the nukes, in with the clean power. Of course, the most urgent modification to the world's predominant power system is ditching coal, then gas, but drastic transitions like this—and Germany's post-nuclear evolution—demonstrate how rapidly things can change.
"A few hundred yards south-east of the quarry site lies the small cave of Hansdown Swallet. The stream sinking here was dye-traced in 1973. It travelled to St. Andrew's by the Bishop's Palace in just 20 hours.”
Mendip planners have yet to decide how to deal with the applications. In South Somerset district West Crewkerne Against Wind Turbines is fighting an application for a turbine that would be 67 metres tall to its blade tip on the West Crewkerne-Wayford-Winsham ridge. The group says it would be visible for 15 miles and spoil precious landscape.
Somerset's only large wind turbine, at Shooters Bottom, Chewton Mendip, was built in 2008 after a four-year battle. Mendip District Council turned down the Ecotricity but permission was granted on appeal.
2013年1月22日 星期二
2013年1月20日 星期日
The right way to fail in cleantech
The transition to cleantech – some would call it a revolution – inevitably entails change, which implies risk. In turn, this implies that some things will fail.
We’ve already seen more than a few failures, and we’ll no doubt see many more. As long as the successes outweigh the failures, that’s all that ultimately matters. Indeed, sometimes failure actually enables later successes.
As Thomas Edison has been quoted, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” And, then finally — ta-da! — he discovered an approach that worked for the incandescent lightbulb, thereby changing the world forever.
The management teams and the backers of these companies promised great things with premature hype in innumerable press releases. The companies blew through lots of capital – including substantial government funding.
Then, they fly off the cliff and go bust, and the media and blogosphere — much of which is adverse to cleantech — report their demises with barely-hidden Schadenfreude.
OK, so it’s not like a mass shooting spree: no-one got killed in these failures. But equity holders lost every dollar, creditors took a deep haircut, taxpayer money was wasted, and pretty much everyone active in the cleantech sector gets tainted by extension. As bad as economic failures, worse is when technologies fail because they simply don’t work.
The earliest windfarms of the mid-1980s in California became an eyesore of inoperative machinery, because the turbines were deployed in mass quantity before many engineering and manufacturing problems had been fully resolved. In the wake of this debacle, the U.S. wind industry took more than a decade to recover. By the time wind energy had regained credibility in America, European wind turbine manufacturers dominated the market.
These visions returned to me during a recent trip to Oahu, where my lodging provided me an ongoing view of the Kahuku windfarm standing idle in the face of a week of strong trade-winds. My first thought was a serial failure of the turbines – a relatively new 2.5 megawatt design fromClipper, a manufacturer with known technical issues.
However, as this report indicates, the root cause of the shutdown was unrelated to the wind turbines, but rather some problem with a set of grid-scale batteries being developed by Xtreme Power, and being piloted at the site to test the ability of such batteries to buffer the variable output of a windfarm. The pilot deployment had caused not one but three fires somehow involving the interconnection between the windfarm and the Hawaiian Electric grid, thus causing the windfarm to be idled while sorting out the battery issues.
Why weren’t these batteries tested in smaller scale and in a less obvious setting? Not only is the image of Xtreme Power (and grid-scale energy storage) being adversely affected, the long shutdown of Kahuku is dampening enthusiasm for wind energy in Hawaii.
It is these kinds of visible economic or technical failures that give the cleantech sector a black eye. The bad reputation diminishes civic goodwill, support for favorable public policies, and appetite for private capital to be allocated to the sector.
Unlike Edison’s failures, largely unnoticed by the rest of the world while he returned again and again to the drawing board, visible cleantech failures are distinctly unhelpful.
Such episodes are very painful for those of us on the sidelines working humbly to maintain forward progress in spite of the setbacks that inevitably occur in this long and challenging cleantech transition.
We’ve already seen more than a few failures, and we’ll no doubt see many more. As long as the successes outweigh the failures, that’s all that ultimately matters. Indeed, sometimes failure actually enables later successes.
As Thomas Edison has been quoted, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” And, then finally — ta-da! — he discovered an approach that worked for the incandescent lightbulb, thereby changing the world forever.
The management teams and the backers of these companies promised great things with premature hype in innumerable press releases. The companies blew through lots of capital – including substantial government funding.
Then, they fly off the cliff and go bust, and the media and blogosphere — much of which is adverse to cleantech — report their demises with barely-hidden Schadenfreude.
OK, so it’s not like a mass shooting spree: no-one got killed in these failures. But equity holders lost every dollar, creditors took a deep haircut, taxpayer money was wasted, and pretty much everyone active in the cleantech sector gets tainted by extension. As bad as economic failures, worse is when technologies fail because they simply don’t work.
The earliest windfarms of the mid-1980s in California became an eyesore of inoperative machinery, because the turbines were deployed in mass quantity before many engineering and manufacturing problems had been fully resolved. In the wake of this debacle, the U.S. wind industry took more than a decade to recover. By the time wind energy had regained credibility in America, European wind turbine manufacturers dominated the market.
These visions returned to me during a recent trip to Oahu, where my lodging provided me an ongoing view of the Kahuku windfarm standing idle in the face of a week of strong trade-winds. My first thought was a serial failure of the turbines – a relatively new 2.5 megawatt design fromClipper, a manufacturer with known technical issues.
However, as this report indicates, the root cause of the shutdown was unrelated to the wind turbines, but rather some problem with a set of grid-scale batteries being developed by Xtreme Power, and being piloted at the site to test the ability of such batteries to buffer the variable output of a windfarm. The pilot deployment had caused not one but three fires somehow involving the interconnection between the windfarm and the Hawaiian Electric grid, thus causing the windfarm to be idled while sorting out the battery issues.
Why weren’t these batteries tested in smaller scale and in a less obvious setting? Not only is the image of Xtreme Power (and grid-scale energy storage) being adversely affected, the long shutdown of Kahuku is dampening enthusiasm for wind energy in Hawaii.
It is these kinds of visible economic or technical failures that give the cleantech sector a black eye. The bad reputation diminishes civic goodwill, support for favorable public policies, and appetite for private capital to be allocated to the sector.
Unlike Edison’s failures, largely unnoticed by the rest of the world while he returned again and again to the drawing board, visible cleantech failures are distinctly unhelpful.
Such episodes are very painful for those of us on the sidelines working humbly to maintain forward progress in spite of the setbacks that inevitably occur in this long and challenging cleantech transition.
2012年12月24日 星期一
Grief shared is grief lessened
Something beautiful sprouted from tragedy here in Humboldt, and maybe that’s important to remember this holiday season as our nation reels from the horror of Newtown, Conn. Grief is the immediate focus. But eventually there’s remembrance without such crippling, unrelenting sorrow.
I say this because I met a pair of grieving Iowa mothers who haven’t let the heartbreak of their children’s deaths crush them — in part because they found each other and have clung to each other in their weakest moments.
Renae Dreyer and Candy Robinson probably wouldn’t have become such inseparable business partners and friends if not for the death of Dreyer’s 16-year-old daughter, Brooke, on Aug. 17, 2008, and the death of Robinson’s son, Jordan, also 16, less than a month later on Sept. 7, 2008.
Their children weren’t brutally murdered; these moms can’t imagine their grief and anger compounded by such malicious violence.
But Brooke’s and Jordan’s deaths were similar in that they were sudden. She was killed in a car accident in Humboldt while driving her Pontiac Bonneville.
He collapsed on the lawn of his sister’s home in Spirit Lake and never regained consciousness; autopsy results months later confirmed a rare, deadly infection.
After the death of a young child you end up “searching for your purpose in life,” Dreyer said. “You’re more intuitive to your surroundings — what’s important, what’s not, what your inner voice is saying.” Something as simple as a box of brownie mix can trigger what had been happy memories, and the tears flow.
People say, “Well, you have two other children,” as well-intended consolation, which only infuriates the grieving parents.
Yet despite their similar circumstances in a town of fewer than 5,000 people, Dreyer and Robinson had never met, other than to pass each other in the grocery store aisle.
Dreyer’s husband runs the tire store in town. Robinson owns a title company. Their two children were buried side by side in the local cemetery. But Dreyer was skeptical when a mutual friend suggested that she and Robinson commiserate in neighborly self-therapy.
“Why do we both want to sit around and be pissed off about what happened?” Dreyer wondered. No, these moms are not shrinking violets. They’re spirited women who romp through a full range of emotions. They cry on a daily basis, but also laugh.
Together they combine their hard-won empathy with a refreshing, off-color irreverence as the shopkeepers of Humboldt Engraving & Gifts, a laser-engraving service that crafts a steady stream of memorial items to help remember the dead.
They engrave granite, wood, leather, whatever material — for happy occasions as well as sad. They gabbed and bonded over a couple of beers when they first met and by December 2010 had opened their shop that they refer to as “the biz.”
Robinson talked about how she used to teeter on the verge of an emotional breakdown in a bathroom stall, madly texting Dreyer: “I can’t breathe.”
They burden each other to help bear the grief. Dreyer pointed to a pink ornament that dangled from the small Christmas tree in the middle of the store.
“That’s my daughter’s signature,” she said. The perky cursive handwriting, complete with a doodled heart, was lifted from the last Mother’s Day card that Dreyer received from her daughter. Another red ornament bore Jordan’s signature from a school paper written three days before his death.
I say this because I met a pair of grieving Iowa mothers who haven’t let the heartbreak of their children’s deaths crush them — in part because they found each other and have clung to each other in their weakest moments.
Renae Dreyer and Candy Robinson probably wouldn’t have become such inseparable business partners and friends if not for the death of Dreyer’s 16-year-old daughter, Brooke, on Aug. 17, 2008, and the death of Robinson’s son, Jordan, also 16, less than a month later on Sept. 7, 2008.
Their children weren’t brutally murdered; these moms can’t imagine their grief and anger compounded by such malicious violence.
But Brooke’s and Jordan’s deaths were similar in that they were sudden. She was killed in a car accident in Humboldt while driving her Pontiac Bonneville.
He collapsed on the lawn of his sister’s home in Spirit Lake and never regained consciousness; autopsy results months later confirmed a rare, deadly infection.
After the death of a young child you end up “searching for your purpose in life,” Dreyer said. “You’re more intuitive to your surroundings — what’s important, what’s not, what your inner voice is saying.” Something as simple as a box of brownie mix can trigger what had been happy memories, and the tears flow.
People say, “Well, you have two other children,” as well-intended consolation, which only infuriates the grieving parents.
Yet despite their similar circumstances in a town of fewer than 5,000 people, Dreyer and Robinson had never met, other than to pass each other in the grocery store aisle.
Dreyer’s husband runs the tire store in town. Robinson owns a title company. Their two children were buried side by side in the local cemetery. But Dreyer was skeptical when a mutual friend suggested that she and Robinson commiserate in neighborly self-therapy.
“Why do we both want to sit around and be pissed off about what happened?” Dreyer wondered. No, these moms are not shrinking violets. They’re spirited women who romp through a full range of emotions. They cry on a daily basis, but also laugh.
Together they combine their hard-won empathy with a refreshing, off-color irreverence as the shopkeepers of Humboldt Engraving & Gifts, a laser-engraving service that crafts a steady stream of memorial items to help remember the dead.
They engrave granite, wood, leather, whatever material — for happy occasions as well as sad. They gabbed and bonded over a couple of beers when they first met and by December 2010 had opened their shop that they refer to as “the biz.”
Robinson talked about how she used to teeter on the verge of an emotional breakdown in a bathroom stall, madly texting Dreyer: “I can’t breathe.”
They burden each other to help bear the grief. Dreyer pointed to a pink ornament that dangled from the small Christmas tree in the middle of the store.
“That’s my daughter’s signature,” she said. The perky cursive handwriting, complete with a doodled heart, was lifted from the last Mother’s Day card that Dreyer received from her daughter. Another red ornament bore Jordan’s signature from a school paper written three days before his death.
2012年10月19日 星期五
Efficient LED lighting is Deeply impressive green choice for submarium
The Deep's Lagoon of Light display, which features vivid colours and 66 species of animals, is floodlit by a light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which have been supplied by Hull firm Bonus Electrical.
The environmentally friendly lights at the landmark centre offer a more sustainable way of lighting the lagoon, lasting up to ten times longer than the lamps they replaced and offering an 80 per cent reduction in energy use.
Aquarists at The Deep said the new lights, which run in two lines above the water tank, help recreate a tropical habitat common to the species in the lagoon.
Andrew Mcleod, assistant curator at The Deep, said: "The Lagoon of Light is a tropical fish display, where bright, light conditions are needed.
"These advanced LEDs provide a very intense, vivid type of light that recreates the environment you find on a tropical island where there is a great deal of sunshine."
The intensity of the 14 LED floodlights means the light is able to penetrate the surface of the water and properly illuminate the 200,000-litre tank.
It allows visitors looking through the tank's glass walls to see in great detail the lagoon's coral reef and the colours of 1,100 fish, such as surgeonfish and lipstick tangs.
The LEDs have a life-span of several years, compared with 12 months for the halide lamps the technology has replaced.
Given the power of the LEDs, which are a fraction of the wattage of a traditional light bulb, fewer bulbs are needed. And as LEDs produce a negligible amount of heat, The Deep is no longer required to reduce the temperature in the areas using the lights by air conditioning – saving yet more energy.
The Deep calculates the individual LED installations are already offering a 50 per cent cost reduction on the previous halide lamps.
Mr Mcleod said: "We have considered LEDs before but have been waiting for the technology's development and progress.
"Now, the designs have become a lot more advanced and these particular high-power floodlights offer the type of intensity we need."
Bonus Electrical is now working with The Deep on further applications for the LEDs, from installation in the car parks to being used to grow coral in captivity.
Rob Carter, sales manager of Bonus Electrical, said: "As the use at The Deep shows, there is no downside to advanced LED technology, which offers a sustainable, energy-efficient and cost-effective alternative to traditional lighting.
"This is particularly important at The Deep, where the lights are on for 12 hours every day and have to be reliable, environmentally friendly and not impact on the marine life.
"We're delighted to have supplied to such an iconic attraction and look forward to working with The Deep on rolling out the LEDs to more areas and applications."
The environmentally friendly lights at the landmark centre offer a more sustainable way of lighting the lagoon, lasting up to ten times longer than the lamps they replaced and offering an 80 per cent reduction in energy use.
Aquarists at The Deep said the new lights, which run in two lines above the water tank, help recreate a tropical habitat common to the species in the lagoon.
Andrew Mcleod, assistant curator at The Deep, said: "The Lagoon of Light is a tropical fish display, where bright, light conditions are needed.
"These advanced LEDs provide a very intense, vivid type of light that recreates the environment you find on a tropical island where there is a great deal of sunshine."
The intensity of the 14 LED floodlights means the light is able to penetrate the surface of the water and properly illuminate the 200,000-litre tank.
It allows visitors looking through the tank's glass walls to see in great detail the lagoon's coral reef and the colours of 1,100 fish, such as surgeonfish and lipstick tangs.
The LEDs have a life-span of several years, compared with 12 months for the halide lamps the technology has replaced.
Given the power of the LEDs, which are a fraction of the wattage of a traditional light bulb, fewer bulbs are needed. And as LEDs produce a negligible amount of heat, The Deep is no longer required to reduce the temperature in the areas using the lights by air conditioning – saving yet more energy.
The Deep calculates the individual LED installations are already offering a 50 per cent cost reduction on the previous halide lamps.
Mr Mcleod said: "We have considered LEDs before but have been waiting for the technology's development and progress.
"Now, the designs have become a lot more advanced and these particular high-power floodlights offer the type of intensity we need."
Bonus Electrical is now working with The Deep on further applications for the LEDs, from installation in the car parks to being used to grow coral in captivity.
Rob Carter, sales manager of Bonus Electrical, said: "As the use at The Deep shows, there is no downside to advanced LED technology, which offers a sustainable, energy-efficient and cost-effective alternative to traditional lighting.
"This is particularly important at The Deep, where the lights are on for 12 hours every day and have to be reliable, environmentally friendly and not impact on the marine life.
"We're delighted to have supplied to such an iconic attraction and look forward to working with The Deep on rolling out the LEDs to more areas and applications."
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