3p Contributor: Angelique Van Engelen
Recent Articles
Governmental Climate Change Mitigation Efforts Are Less Costly When They Target Temperatures Rather Than CO2 Emissions Reductions
Climate change mitigation packages should be aimed at reducing temperatures rather than lowering carbon emissions. This makes global government investment in protecting the environment a lot less expensive, say European scientists.
The researchers, in the Netherlands and Germany, have found scientific grounds for the commonly held opinion that high initial costs of eco-friendly solutions are rewarded in the long term by savings from lower energy usage.
Rather than focus on a CO2 emissions cap which is the common approach to climate solutions, the researchers modeled changes based on a cap for future temperature rises.
Working with a temperature cap makes sense in many ways, especially financially, says Michiel Schaeffer of Wageningen University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study. This is because the cost estimates associated with limiting a pre-determined level of carbon emissions often rise rapidly, even exponentially, as the scale of emission reductions to be reached increases.
The True Cost of a Home: How Green Trends Might Save the Housing Market
There’s a paradigm shift going on in the US real estate sector. Yet will home owners justify paying extra for green building if the economic situation continues to deteriorate?
The US homeowner population has been silently suffering for years now. Numbers from the Center for Housing Policy show that between 1996 and 2006, homeowners have been spending an increasing portion of their income on housing (the current crisis notwithstanding). A household would typically spend 21.5 percent of its total income on housing in 1996 and this had risen to 26.2 percent in 2006. Nearly a sixth of homeowners were far worse off, spending more than 50 percent of their disposable income on their homes in 2006. Another harrowing fact: housing expenses went up 64.9 percent over the ten year period, while homeowner incomes increased by only 36.3 percent.
It makes you wonder how sustainable the sustainable building wave will prove to be. “In order to avoid repeating the dire situation so many home owners are in today, it is critical that our thinking evolve around home costs,” said Michelle Kaufmann, founder and chairman of Michelle Kaufmann Designs, an architecture firm specializing in sustainable designs. Kaufmann’s recently published white paper “Redefining Cost: A Beacon of Hope Shines through Housing Market Gloom” (PDF link). The study hones in on the current troubles in the US housing industry outlining why it is imperative to consider cost structures in a changed perspective.
(Near) Carbon Neutral Communities
Europeans are far ahead of North Americans when it comes to adopting green living standards by large groups and local communities. The Danish Island of Samso is a brilliant example of how a community can adopt a self sufficient lifestyle within a relatively short space of time. North America is beginning to catch up with Europe. The case of a brand new Alberta community living on solar energy shows a unique approach to a sustainable lifestyle.
The Danish island is located in central Denmark, and home to 4,000 people who have spent the last ten years collaborating intensively to achieve self sufficiency and carbon neutrality. Samso’s energy needs are generated by wind turbines, eleven of which are placed in green fields and ten in the surrounding coastal waters of the North Sea. Visitors to the island will agree that if any place deserves carbon neutrality it’s Samso. It’s a romantic place which in 1214 was given by King Valdemar the Victorious to his new queen once they got married. There are plenty of goats grazing in the fields underneath those wind turbines and a photovoltaic panel array at a solar heating plant. Most farmers rear organic pigs below the unsynchronized rotating blades of the wind turbines.
The houses in which the inhabitants live are 70% heated with natural resources such as rye, wheat and straw. The roofs are paneled neatly with solar panels. There are cars and thirty percent of the houses are dependent on oil for their heating yet all the carbon emissions are more than offset. What’s the most amazing is that it all has been achieved in under ten years’ time.
Datacenters That Heat Swimming Pools, Residences, Hotels
Datacenters that are faced with the challenge of cooling their servers have a brilliant opportunity to jump on the green bandwagon and distribute energy. A European IBM outlet, an Israeli Intel facility and a Scottish Microsoft center are all using the heat their datacenters produce to warm up buildings and other facilities. IBM is even commercializing its method.
The Zurich Research Laboratory is a grand name for the defunct military underground bunker in which IBM housed one of its European datacenters. The company is putting the datacenter’s heat waste to good use; it is cooling its servers with water which is subsequently used to heat a local swimming pool.
A report on IEEE Spectrum indicates that instead of using air-conditioning or fans, the IBM datacenter simply has devised a water pump system through micro channels within the computers themselves. The water then absorbs the heat from the datacenter and sold to the neighbors. “A 10-megawatt datacenter could produce enough energy to heat 700 homes,” according to the article in IEEE Spectrum. Nifty or what?
The reason that IBM opted for heating up the pool rather than its own facility was that there wasn’t an office to heat up because the bunker is based in an inconvenient location and underground. “Through reclaiming the heat, approximately 130 tons of carbon emissions can be saved. This corresponds to the CO2 discharge of mid-size cars driving 500,000 miles,” according to IBM spokesman. “It’s a nice solution. It’s obviously a terrific example of the private sector and the public sector working toward each other’s mutual benefit.”
Datacenters Are Running Out Of Energy, Fast.
A recent report has revealed that data centers will face critical shortages of energy in less than three years. By 2011, two thirds of all datacenters won’t have enough electricity to perform critical computing tasks.
The survey, carried out by Emerson Network Power is based on interviews with datacenter professionals. 64% of the 167 respondents estimate that they are going to run out of data capacity by 2011 because they will be faced with energy shortages by then.
The situation in Europe is no better than in the US. IDC recently issued a report that had similar findings, indicating that European data centers will land in an energy crisis in the near future too. The main reason being that energy consumption increased by more than 13% between 2006 and 2007. The report predicted that energy consumption by data center facilities would reach more than 42 terawatt hours in 2008.
The Financial Proposals At Poznan
The ongoing global climate negotiations in the Polish town of Poznan are all about financing, insiders say. So what proposals are on the table? A roundup of some headline generating plans:
The future of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is at the heart of the discussions. New projects in this mechanism, which allows emission-reduction projects in developing countries to sell credits to industrialized countries wishing to meet their emission reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol, are worth $25 billion. Last year alone, $82 billion worth of carbon credits were traded globally. The certificates are aimed at boosting technology transfer to developing countries.
How a Local Firewood Cooperative Can Lower a Nation’s Carbon Footprint
It’s one of the biggest issues currently being addressed in Poznan: How can we stop the burning of forests as poor people burn firewood to make a living? Wood is also increasingly popular as a biomass fuel. So what’s the deal? Can we burn wood and not impact the environment?
The quick answer is that so long as the wood comes from a well managed forest, you’re more or less in the clear. And in case you are worried about the ecological impact of the smoke and the carbon dioxide emissions, this recent article in The Telegraph newspaper points out that because wood is a biomass fuel, burning is is carbon neutral – when you burn wood, it releases the exact amount of carbon dioxide that it absorbed when growing. It may actually be better to burn wood in some cases because when wood decomposes, it slowly lets go of the carbon it soaked up, a process which in many cases goes by unaccounted for (also read my article Clearing Forests Of Dead Wood Prevents Massive CO2 Emissions). So long as replanting matches harvesting your burning it will not lead to an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Far more serious is what happens in the rainforests in Asia. The impact of people’s burning of firewood is dramatic because it leads to the loss of natural forests.
Alternative Energy – The Importance of Community Projects
Alternative energy schemes are going to be making important inroads around the globe. But the social implications of this should not be underestimated. A recent study by the Energy Savings Trust in the UK outlines how the scenario is likely to unfold in Britain.
The study, entitled Power in Numbers, underscores the vast untapped potential of schemes that are organized at local and community level. “Today energy generated by communities could produce about 13% of all household needs. With the right policies in place this potential could rise to 54%,” according to the report.
COP14 Begins – What Can We Expect?
The two-week COP14 climate talks which start today in Poznan Poland, are the halfway mark in a two year negotiation effort by no less than 190 countries on a replacement for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
The new concept is way more ambitious than Kyoto which was signed by only 37 industrialized countries who committed to reducing carbon emissions to below 1990 levels by an average 5% by 2012. China, which had been hesitant about some of the issues on the table made a u-turn in its policy last December when it agreed to commit to a target in emissions reductions – on condition that it wouldn’t be bound to the same limits as industrial countries, and only if the rich world assists the poor countries in transitioning to cleaner production methods.
The Poznan conference will begin reviewing ideas on how to help poor nations in their efforts to combat climate change. A major part of this will be ideas as to how to finance the technological transfer that’s needed and what kind of targets are fair. Another focus point will be how to incentivize countries to successfully cut back on deforestation. Efforts will be made to agree to a time table for all these issues and achieve agreement by December next year.
CleanTech Goes Through The Roof
Investment managers at cleantech funds are looking at the world with totally new eyes these days – the financial crisis, which has ravaged stock prices and wiped out major financial institutions, offers buying opportunities that are unprecedented. Now’s the best time to snap up bargains, they say.
The hard numbers prove this ain’t illogical. Investment in the US clean tech sector rose 55% to more than $2.4 billion over the past twelve months. One of the main drivers of this could be the US government’s $700 billion Housing and Recovery Act stimulus package. The tax concessions boosted wind energy, geothermal and biomass projects and are expected to have a long lasting effect on the capital markets.
Recent Comments