Earth Blog

Here is quick round-up of some of the cons associated with wind turbines: killing winged creatures, killing of maintenance workers, flicker syndrome,  and ambiguous placement on the runway for Chanel’s 2013 Spring/Summer line.  

Offshore wind farms have a slightly different set of issues that have been discussed on the blog: affects (if any) on marine life, disrupting a view, and offending Donald Trump. Now we can add “ringing” to the list.

Professor John Grue from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Oslo, Norway is one of the world's foremost experts on wave research.  Way back in 1989 he discovered ringing  in a 25-meter long wave laboratory located in the basement of a mathematics building.

At the end of last year SC Johnson announced that the addition of two 415-foot wind turbines at the company's manufacturing facility in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin called Waxdale will produce about 8 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity a year. The company says that’s enough electricity to power 700 homes annually.

Waxdale, the size of 36 football fields, has two cogeneration turbines and is now able to produce on average all of its electrical energy onsite.

Yesterday SC Johnson said they are participating in Mexico’s Comision Federal de Electricidad’s wind farm program.  This move will enable SC Johnson to increase its use of renewable energy at its Toluca, Mexico facility to an estimated 86 percent, a 65 percent uptick, and will decrease greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) by 57 percent.

Last Friday Brian Merchant the “Energy/Renewable Energy” writer over at Treehugger reported that the Solar Power Generating Systems California Public Utilities Commission submitted their renewable energy progress report for the 2012 first and second quarter to the state’s legislature.

The good news is that 20.6% of the state's power demand was handled by renewables like solar.

Accompanying the article was a photo of a roof outfitted with solar panels in the foreground. The tops of palm trees dotted the roofline while the pristine snow-topped San Gabriel Mountains of California stood in the background as prominent as the solar panels.

The juxtaposition of nature and solar panels in a photo is not unusual but the image provided is striking and evokes California immediately. But the picture has a dirty little secret: the roof belongs to a Walmart in Covina. Merchant even put an exclamation point after the photo’s caption -“Walmart!”

According to a new study from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany (Fun Fact: Mainz is Johannes Gutenberg’s hometown) major nuclear accidents happen every 10-20 years. The findings were published in this month’s journal of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

This estimation wouldn’t sound as ominous if applied to another type of accident like a fender bender but since it has to do with something far more dangerous and widespread it has to be considered.

Germany seems to have considered the risks and decided to abandon nuclear power saying they intend to completely phase it out by 2022 and focus on renewable energy.  After Japan’s Fukushima disaster last year it seems everyone is a bit unsure about the future of nuclear.

“Wind power is going to be a part of the solution to the climate change, air pollution and energy security problems," said Somnath Baidya Roy at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. "Understanding the impacts of wind farms is critical for developing efficient adaptation and management strategies to ensure the long-term sustainability of wind power."

Donald Trump may not want eleven wind turbines near his proposed golf resort in Scotland and when we say near we mean sunk offshore approximately 1.5 miles away. It’s not like they are being worked into the course like one of those novelty windmills at a local mini-golf center. However, there are plenty of other communities and countries willing to consider the idea.

Wind turbines are high profile projects and there has been study after study about the safety, the “health problems” they could cause residents, and how off shore turbines affect the marine environment. This week a study about wind farms in Texas increasing  surface temperatures at night was published in the April 29th issue of Nature Climate Change.

Today the EPA released their annual top 25 metropolitan areas with the most Energy Star certified buildings.

Three California cities are in the top ten with Los Angeles ranked 1st, San Francisco at 3rd, and Riverside is ranked 9th. According to the EPA, Los Angeles has been in the top spot since 2008.

California has a total of six cities on the list with Sacramento (12th), San Diego (19th), and San Jose (21st) making the Golden State the host with the most.

How do Energy Star buildings differ from buildings that carry LEED certification?

Residents of towns where wind turbines are proposed tend to be focused on the aesthetics, noise, safety, and how living in the flickering shadow of the turbine blades will affect their health. In Denmark there are some creatures who are perfectly happy living with wind turbines.

New research by DTU Aqua has found that the fish living under the sea and amongst the turbines of one of the largest Danish offshore wind farms, Horns Rev 1, are thriving.

Last night former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich secured a win in Georgia’s primary and gave a speech.  In this speech he said he wasn’t pandering to voters, as fellow candidate Mitt Romney claimed, when promising $2.50 a gallon gas price if elected. He called it leading. A great leader has grand ideas and goals. Another great ability Gingrich possesses is the ability to employ euphemisms. 

Did you ever play SimCity for the Super Nintendo or PC growing up? Not The Sims, the simulation game where a player basically creates a suburban version of his or herself, but rather the old school game rooted in city planning and map making. 

Do you remember the anxiety felt when building an airport in your simulated town because, yes the residents are demanding it but it’s going to create so much pollution! How did you fight pollution? Did you place the airport on an island, far away from residential areas but connected to the main land via rail? Did you surround it with park land trying to combat pollution with the power of trees? Did any of that even work to reduce pollution? Furthermore SimCity was just a game; you could always destroy your town and start all over.  That isn’t an option in real life when city planners look at their communities and airports.

Akron, Ohio, based FirstEnergy will close six coal-fired power plants across Ohio, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, by September because they are old and it would be costly to bring them up to the EPA’s recently passed Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS). The six might be in the first wave, if not the first, of plants that will close as energy providers weigh the costs of upgrading.

San Diego residents will want to start saying, “Stay smart, San Diego.” Instead of the over-used “Stay classy, San Diego.” quote favored by the main character, Ron Burgundy, of the movie Anchorman.

Smart City San Diego is a cooperative effort between the city’s government, organizations, and businesses to support and increase sustainable programs. They hope the model will be an inspiration for other communities to start their own initiatives and projects. It’s still a young collaboration only a year old this month- but has accomplished much so far. 

Last year was a fantastic year for photovoltaic (PV) solar systems, or solar power, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). The SEIA reported, “The price of solar panels dropped 40 percent since the beginning of 2010 and the average installed system price dropped 14.4 percent from quarter two to quarter three alone.” and “Grid-connected PV installations in quarter three 2011 grew 140 percent over quarter three 2010.”

The ethanol subsidy the United States government has provided for the corn and energy industries quietly expired at the end of 2011. Last year the amount of money payed out was about $6 billion. There were no reports of corn farmers stowing their machinery to storm the steps of Congress, pitchforks in hand, to demand the subsidy be renewed. There would have been no one in Congress to greet the farmers anyway; they had adjourned for the holidays. The tariff on imported ethanols, like Brazil’s sugarcane ethanol, also expired.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) should have looked into sending a free, carbon-neutral penguin dressed in a little, blue postal uniform to the United Nations Climate Conference to help represent them at a media roundtable in Durban, South Africa this week. The roundtable was co-hosted by the South African Post Office and by the International Post Corporation, an association that includes the USPS and twenty-three postal agencies across the globe whose goal is to improve international postal services. 

Sugar is not usually the first substance that comes to mind when we think about a renewable, alternative fuel. We definitely look to it for sweetening our morning cup of coffee or a glass of lemonade. But Brazil “has replaced more than half of its gasoline needs with sugarcane ethanol- making gasoline the alternative fuel” according to sweeteralternative.com, a website about the benefits of sugarcane ethanol. The United States is now the world’s leading producer and exporter of corn ethanol and Brazil thinks it’s only fair that we let their sugarcane ethanol in tariff-free because they let our corn ethanol in untaxed.

There is a surfeit of award shows on television from the time-honored and effortlessly glamourous Academy Awards (The Oscars) to the mind-boggling and seemingly useless ESPY’s, the ESPN sports network’s acronym for their Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly Award. The hype and hoopla has gotten to be a little much when it comes to award shows and the bad ratings show that the viewing public has abandoned them for other programming.

But the most important awards handed out, like the Nobel or Pulitzer Prizes, aren't televised. Now there is even an event being called “the Oscars of the energy industry” and it’s the Platts Global Energy Awards. This is the thirteenth year for the awards which were hosted by Platts in New York and included a black-tie dinner.

California is always in the news for one thing or other. California controversies start on the frivolous side of the scale with celebrities on one end and the difficult side with the socio-political and environmental struggles the state is constantly trying overcome. Clearly, living in the great state of California comes with great responsibility. It’s a big state with varied geography and an even more varied population so there is much to protect.

When we look at birds, we merely see their beautiful colors and marvel at how they live such intriguing lives, weathering storms, finding mates, flying vast distances and building homes. When scientists look at birds, they see an untapped resource for finding out many of nature's deep secrets.

Japanese officials have lifted their evacuation in five areas near the Fukushima nuclear power facility damaged by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami earlier this year. Residents are still fearful of the areas, but Japan is determined to restore normalcy to the country. They are still restricting the area within a 12 mile radius of the nuclear facility.

About 200 protestors are blocking the entrance to the Hinkley Point nuclear power facility in Somerset, England. They are protesting the decision by EDF Energy to add two additional reactors to the facility. A total of eight new reactors are in the works for the U.K. in the near future. The group responsible for the protests is part of the alliance known as Stop New Nuclear. Their goal is to use civil disobedience to halt the building of the eight reactors.