Links for Sept. 27, 2009: Three environmental pieces
Sunday, 27 September, 2009 — links environment
Three New York Times articles suggest a very pragmatic direction to improve energy efficiency, reduce need for new power plants - or, allow for less efficient plants to be retired - and thereby reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted.
Solar Power, Without All Those Panels
…companies are now offering alternatives to these fixed installations, in the less conspicuous form of shingles, tiles and other building materials that have photovoltaic cells sealed within them.
“The new materials are part of the building itself, not an addition, and they are taking photovoltaics to the next level — an aesthetic one,” said Alfonso Velosa III, a research director at Gartner and co-author of a coming report on the market for the new field, called building-integrated photovoltaics.
By giving a home or building the capacity to satisfy some of its own power requirements, the grid itself gets a bit of an infrastructural buffer. Think fewer brownouts during high demand, or the ability to keep the fridge running if a transformer down the street blows up.
Build a Better Bulb for a $10 Million Prize
The ubiquitous but highly inefficient 60-watt light bulb badly needs a makeover. And it could be worth millions in government prize money — and more in government contracts — to the first company that figures out how to do it.
…
The L Prize has garnered significant attention in the lighting industry because 60-watt incandescent lamps represent 50 percent of all the lighting in the United States, with 425 million sold each year. The Energy Department says that if all those lamps were LED equivalents, enough power would be saved to light 17.4 million American households and cut carbon emissions by 5.6 million metric tons annually.
The article talks about Phillips’ entry for the L Prize, but I’d keep my eye on Morrisville-based Cree.
Paul Krugman:
It’s important, then, to understand that claims of immense economic damage from climate legislation are as bogus, in their own way, as climate-change denial. Saving the planet won’t come free (although the early stages of conservation actually might). But it won’t cost all that much either.
How do we know this? First, the evidence suggests that we’re wasting a lot of energy right now. That is, we’re burning large amounts of coal, oil and gas in ways that don’t actually enhance our standard of living — a phenomenon known in the research literature as the “energy-efficiency gap.” The existence of this gap suggests that policies promoting energy conservation could, up to a point, actually make consumers richer.
I’d settle for staying even.