Earth Blog

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.

San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) has been a busy little public utility lately. The company is launching green programs for the 3.5 million people it provides electricity and gas services to faster than you can say “corporate sustainability.”

This week alone SDG&E announced their “Green Button” tool for customers and opened their Energy Innovation Center in San Diego. It all looks like a lot of fun so let’s go in for a closer look!

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.”

Although solar power is a clean form of energy, the panels are expensive and are not as efficient as many consumers demand.  Nico Hotz, an engineer at Duke University in North Carolina, has developed a hybrid solar power technology that could be the answer to cheaper, more efficient solar power.  In Hotz’s system, solar panels are filled with water and methanol enclosed in glass tubes.  The sunlight heats the water and methanol, which then mix with a catalyst to form hydrogen.  The hydrogen is then stored to be used as fuel.  Using this method, 95 percent of the sunlight can be used to create energy.

Anything that helps reduce the world population’s dependence on non-renewable energy sources is most definitely a friend of the environment…and the Sea Bird.  A new approach to solar energy known as polarizing organic photovoltaic technology sheds bright light on clean, renewable energy efforts. This technology may soon make it possible to charge our cell phones and other handheld electronics by recycling the device’s own energy and making use of both artificial and natural ambient light.