Yesterday I wrote of a technology called concentrated photovoltaics, which if all goes well, may bring the retail cost of solar panels down from at present, $4.31 per watt, to 30c per watt.

Moore's Law for Solar - 30c watt in years to come

The technology I discussed was the concentration of the sun, using fresnel lens or mirrors like in a telescope, being able to reduce the area of active semi conductor material down to 1000th of that of Silicon to produce equivalent electricity.

Today I'd like to look at Silicon solar cells and what happens if we concentrate sunlight onto them.

2006-07 Australian bushfire season
The 2006-07 Australian bushfire season was one of the most extensive bushfire seasons in Australia's history. Victoria experienced the longest continuously burning bushfire complex in Australia's history, with fires in the Victorian Alps and Gippsland burning over 1 million hectares of land over the course of 69 days.

January 2009
The early 2009 southeastern Australia heat wave was a heat wave that commenced in late January and led to record-breaking prolonged high temperatures in the region. The heat wave is considered one of, if not the most, extreme in the region's history. During the heat wave, 50 separate locations set various records for consecutive, highest daytime and overnight temperatures.

According to a Monash University study of funeral notices, more than 200 people died as a result of the heat wave. A 45% increase in the death rate was noted during the time. A subsequent report by Victoria's chief health officer, Dr John Carnie, put the final figure at 374.

February 2009
As many as 400 individual fires were recorded on 7 February. Following the events of the 7th of February 2009, that date has since been referred to as Black Saturday.

173 people died as a result of the fires and 414 were injured.

November 2009
Senior climatologist Blair Trewin said 68 long-term weather stations recorded their highest November maximum temperature and 39 stations recorded their highest overnight minimum temperature.

''That represents 10.2 per cent of Australia recording record highs, including 41 per cent of NSW and 29 per cent of South Australia,'' Dr Trewin said.

In Adelaide, the eight consecutive days above 35 degrees doubled the previous November record. It also had a record high of 43.

So records are broken, two years later they are broken again. Not the kind of record you want to break though. When temperatures are causing multiple heat related deaths and bushfires causing loss of life and property, you'd think we'd realize something is up with that. And just as Australia is about to head into Summer, we see the same conditions occurring at the start of Summer which we just saw at the end of Summer immediately prior to the worst bushfires in Australia's history earlier this year.

Scary stuff hey?

Yesterday I wrote of my visit to a solar thermal power station in the Nevada Desert, at Boulder City, near Las Vegas. The plant produces 65 MW of electricity which, during the day, would be close to supplying the needs of 65,000 homes.

The accumulation of CO2 emissions we have been told for over 20 years would create conditions like those described above. So from a risk management point of view, seeking alternatives to where the source of those emissions comes from makes sense. In other words reducing or replacing the source of those emissions is the optimum outcome without eliminating the benefit of the plant itself.

What I would like to talk about is what I think Australia can do to meet energy generated from some of these types of means.

On a daily basis there are louder and louder calls for us to begin to act on Climate disruption. With stories about sea-ice almost completely gone, Australia's food bowl continues to dersertify, temperature rise threatening the Barrier Reef one could get overwhelmed with the sheer scale of these challenges to even contemplate doing anything at all. Couple this up with the denialosphere and its easy to get paralyzed in fear.

I have a different idea.

In two articles I've written HERE and HERE I have laid out the importance of energy in our everyday lives and how where we obtain the primary energy we use, governments around the world do have an input in. I have also shown that decision making on how and what form of energy systems we will have has been kept behind closed doors without transparency for a number of years which has resulted in behavior which politicians ought not partake in if they truly have free market principles and public good at heart.

With the research I have conducted one of the things which I have often questioned is why countries such as Spain and Germany have such a strong renewables sector, when Australia with more wide open country, uninhabited sunny areas than almost any other, we have not developed a strong domestic solar industry. Equally strange is lack of offshore wind, geothermal or wave power resource utilization.

Crossposted from DailyKos. (Thanks!) Promoted. It's quite long, but well worth it. -- GH

I think it was maybe a year ago I was flicking through cable TV, and I happened across a movie called "There Will Be Blood."

There Will Be Blood is a 2007 American drama film directed, written and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson. The film is loosely based on the Upton Sinclair novel Oil! (1927). It tells the story of a silver-miner-turned-oil-man on a ruthless quest for wealth during Southern California's oil boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

I'd read a few books, watched a few documentaries and done a ton of internet research not long before this and had been slowly coming to the conclusion that we genuinely had a whole bunch of powerful people who knew that emissions of C02 were endangering the ability of life to survive on our planet. The frightening thing was many of these people were working hard to make sure we kept burning fossil fuels at ever increasing rates and making sure the transition to cleaner sources of energy never happened.

I didn't really understand why though until I watched this movie and a few pennies dropped.

THURSDAY NIGHT IS HEALTH CARE CHANGE NIGHT, a weekly Health Care Series. I have this private mantra: it's all about energy, it's all about climate. Somewhat like six degrees of separation, no matter the issue area, I can (I will ...) bring any and all conversation items back to our energy and climate challenges. But, when it comes to health (and health care) and energy, we're not talking about six degrees of separation but, in fact, at least six ways they're intertwined ...

The breaking news in the lobbying world last Friday: lobbying firm Bonner & Associates had forged letters from minority organizations to send to Representative Tom Perriello (D-VA) in opposition to the American Clean Energy & Security Act. Now, of course, it is all an intern's fault (or is it a temp worker ... or a contract employee ... oh, it really doesn't matter since this goes against Bonner's long-standing practice of, well, engaging in deceptive and questionable lobbying practices.) 

This is a story that won't go away, for any number of reasons.

A gift that keeps on giving ...

Becca of DelphiForums noticed an interesting coincidence between the current gas price temperature map and the results of the 2004 Presidential election: can you spot it, too?

Could this simply be a coincidental reflection of relative demand, population density or other economic demographics, or could it reflect potential market manipulation by commodity traders, now under investigation?

What do you think? It's not as thought there's any kind of evidence of Republicans ever gaming the system, right?

From the Wall Street Journal,

_____

Global-Warming Study Weighs Impact of Human Action

By GAUTAM NAIK

May 15, 2008; Page A10

A new study says humans have changed the world's environment more by warming the climate than by directly encroaching on habitats.

The research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, also establishes a link between climate change and narrower, continental changes such as the earlier spring flight of butterflies in California, the earlier release of pollen in the Netherlands and the increased growth of pine trees in Mongolia.
_____

An international team of over a dozen scientists, led by Cynthia Rosenzweig of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University in New York, showed very strong indications based on studies done on a continental scale.

In other news,

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: After spending months dawdling over a bill that will redefine Ohio’s energy system for years to come, the Public Utilities Committee in the Ohio House yesterday got a sudden burst of energy that kept them sequestered into the wee hours of the morning in a subterranean meeting room, as they accepted a new, possibly industry-built version of a bill that the majority Republican party accepted and passed out of committee without Democrats even being in the room.

Democrats voiced concerns that they were given precious little time to read the new version of the bill, which one source reported had the digital fingerprints of a known utility insider on it and also said the committee chairman’s denial of their request to meet in private to review amendments they had not seen before was a case of disrespect to minority members.

-- originally posted 2008-02-17 05:09:16 - bumped

On January 12, 2008, I posted a piece titled Smarter Parts: Improving Efficient Energy Use and Demand? that touched upon an experimental program sponsored out of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The essence of the program was to create a home energy system that could respond to changing prices and peak demand loads by dialing back energy consumption. The system would be accessible via the internet so homeowners could make changes in absentia. An update to the story included another article indicating that in 2009, California regulators may have direct access to homeowner thermostats via radio-controlled devices in new or substantially modified houses and buildings to manage electricity shortages -- a plan cooked up by the California Energy Commission (CEC).

I opened a discussion thread for the piece in a few places, including several Delphi forums. In one thread,¹ some energy and water efficiency ideas came up. One in particular spawned the short poll that you're about to see. Please read on, and take the poll; results will be published at the end of next week and included in another piece that I will cross-post in all areas where this appears.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: Ohio Governor Ted Strickland will soon be sent names of candidates to fill the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) post set to expire in April.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: The label “battleground state” generally refers to a state whose Electoral College votes can make or break a race for the White House. Ohio, the nation’s 7th largest state with 20 such votes, has been so designated in previous election cycles and is predicted to again defend that title this year.

This year the moniker "battleground state" may more aptly describe the breakout of intra-state battles taking shape over the budget, voting systems and energy. These battles are creating fissures between Republicans, who still rule the roost at the legislature and office of auditor, and Democrats, who for the first time in 16 years control the executive branch and offices of attorney general, treasurer and secretary of state.

Could creating "smarter" homes with devices and sensors that can monitor electrical demand and heating requirements -- including the going market price for electricity -- help automate efforts to use energy more efficiently and lower the impact of peak demand on the nation's power grid?

Possibly.

There's an interesting diary over on DailyKos right now -- it caught my interest, at least. It's Confused priorities: the scramble to exploit the Arctic sea bed by JohnnyRook.

Here's two of the comments -- one by NoBigGovernment, and my response. Both are, IMO, points worth keeping in mind while reading thru:

Unfortunately

Why are our leaders and the leaders of these other nations wasting time and money on seeing who can get access to the most underwater fossil fuels instead of investing in the renewable energy that might make it possible to keep New York, St. Petersburg, Vancouver, Copenhagen etc. above the waterline?

because they have to at this point. I think all reasonable nations are in fact investing in renewables, but in the meantime we need fuel to continue to make the world go round so to speak.

You just can't flip a switch and move from fossil fuels. Granted we could, and should, move faster but it's difficult to fault people for being somewhat prudent.

by NoBigGovernment on Mon Dec 31, 2007 at 03:02:54 PM EST

_______________

"Prudent is as prudent does" so to speak...

...the BushCheney (CheneyBush?) Administration and Big Oil Republicans have done everything they can to force continued dependence on fossil fuels, when they should have been more prudent with the nation's resources and forward-thinking.

Instead, they essentially created a reality that is forcing us into greater, prolonged dependency but without any additional oversight, conservation, intelligent distribution or development of alternatives.

You are very correct that we need to be prudent with regard to a potentially untapped resource (vs. the relatively imprudent push by some to open the Arctic Refuge, which is a piddling amount in exchange for the potential damage/cost/impact).

However, we should eye any movement by BushCheney as an initial foray into yet another attempt to overfeed, gorge and run rampant instead of developing a sound policy for the securing, developing, use and distribution of energy and fuel sources.  

We must extricate BushCheney and their primary cheerleaders/benefactors from the process first, then put proper foundational structures into effect (rules, regs, laws and plans)...

Never, never brave me, nor my fury tempt:
  Downy wings, but wroth they beat;
Tempest even in reason's seat.

by GreyHawk on Mon Dec 31, 2007 at 03:28:43 PM EST

I do believe a genuine plan is needed to ensure that our economy and nation can adequately operate while slowly weaning itself off of oil. I do not, however, believe that the Republicans, Big Oil, the Bush Administration or anyone currently embedded with any or all of the above should have anything to do with it.

There are also some major corporations and other political parties who need to either recommit to the nation's priorites -- which should include a proper degree of planning for current and future needs -- or be banned from participating in the work of the people.

What do you think?