New York State Pledges to Start Talks on a North American Carbon Market

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has made several strong commitments to act on climate, but it’s unclear how New York will follow through.

by Julia Pyper 
October 09, 2015








As another round of global climate negotiations approach, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has positioned his state to be a national and global role model for aggressive climate action.

Cuomo announced yesterday that New York state has signed the Under 2 Memorandum of Understanding, a global pledge to prevent the Earth’s average temperature from rising 2 degrees Celsius from the pre-industrial level benchmark by 2100 -- which is widely considered the limit to avoid catastrophic climate change. New York joins 42 other jurisdictions in 19 countries that have made the same commitment.

“As U.N. climate negotiations begin in Paris this December, the powerful collective of signatories to the MOU are demonstrating the urgency of action, and the importance of setting binding targets,” Cuomo said in a speech at Columbia University, appearing alongside former Vice President Al Gore. “World leaders must now follow suit.”

Cuomo announced that New York will also reach out to California, Quebec and Ontario, as well as state partners in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) to explore the possibility of linking carbon markets.

“Hopefully, this will drive a national discussion to every state in the nation,” said Cuomo.

In terms of activity within the state, the governor made a new commitment to bring solar to 150,000 more homes and businesses by 2020. He also pledged to install renewable energy at each of the State University of New York’s 64 campuses by the same year.

These recent announcements build on previous efforts to combat climate change, including targets to reduce state emissions 40 percent by 2030 and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. The goals were introduced under the previous administration, and reaffirmed in June as part of New York’s 2015 State Energy Plan.

To achieve these reductions, New York launched Reforming the Energy Vision -- a comprehensive energy agenda that includes a fundamental restructuring of the state’s electricity sector.

"The leadership shown by Governor Cuomo and New York state to make bold emissions reductions commitments is vital to solving the climate crisis,” said former Vice President Al Gore.

New York’s efforts have been broadly met with praise, but also some skepticism.

Conor Bambrick, air and energy director at Environmental Advocates of New York, said it’s encouraging to see the governor publicly embracing strong goals, but added that the path to meeting them is far from clear.

“From our point of view, these goals are great, they’re ambitious, but we would also need to see a concrete plan as to how to get there,” he said.

New York’s carbon reduction goals are not written into law as California's are. The Golden State has the same target to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050. Without a clear directive, the heads of state agencies lack the authority and impetus to achieve these goals, which is not going to be any small task, said Bambrick.

“An 80% by 2050 reduction means within the next three decades, our power systems, heating and cooling of buildings, and transport all have to be electrified by clean renewable energy,” he said. “Without a plan or mandate of future administrations written in the law…we worry that the state may fall short.”

Bambrick added that the expansion of New York’s carbon market is an exciting prospect with a lot of potential.

RGGI members are expected to meet through 2016 to discuss the future of the program beyond its current end date of 2020, and as a possible compliance mechanism for the Clean Power Plan. Joining with California, the Canadian provinces and other states in the Northeast adds a new layer to the initiative that could shift RGGI’s carbon market for power plant emissions to an economy-wide program.

Lori Severino, spokesperson for New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation, reiterated Cuomo’s view that carbon markets are a powerful tool for reducing pollution. But with conversations just getting underway, she said it’s too soon to know what the structure will look like.

Dave Clegern, spokesperson for the California Air Resources Board, said his state is “committed to working with others to expand the number of jurisdictions that put a price on carbon.” However, he would not speculate further on the market design.

California made its own climate news this week with Gov. Jerry Brown signing into law SB 350, which requires the state to generate half of its electricity from renewable sources and double building energy efficiency by 2030. A third goal to cut gasoline use in half was ultimately eliminated from the bill, but legislators kept requirements for California’s electric utilities to invest in electric-vehicle charging infrastructure and support EV adoption.

“The passage and signing of SB 350 prove once again that California is the nation’s leader in the fight against climate change,” said Pasquale Romano, CEO of the EV station network ChargePoint.

New York, it appears, wants to challenge the Golden State for that title.

source by:http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/new-york-state-pledges-to-start-talks-on-a-north-american-carbon-market

It could be lights out for solar power under this government

Terry Macalister

Ten times as many of the jobs lost at Redcar are at risk under the government’s plans to cut solar power subsidies by 87% – and it may be schools that suffer most

 Solar panels on the roof of a school in Liverpool. Subsidies for nuclear and gas power stations are increasing but falling for wind and solar power. Photograph: Alamy

                Ministers rightly wring their hands over the 2,200 jobs being lost at the 98-year-old Redcar steelworks hit by low-cost Chinese competition. But they seem deaf to warnings of 27,000 jobs being potentially lost in a brand-new industry now facing crisis due to their own clumsy cuts.

Almost 1,000 redundancies have already been made by the solar panel installers Mark Group and Climate Energy. No one in the industry believes this will be the end of the sad story.

The latest flashpoint for “green” developers is the government plan to slash the feed-in tariff – which subsidises people installing solar panels on their home – by almost 90%. Meanwhile, an energy-efficiency regime has been scrapped with only a vague promise of a future replacement.

If these were isolated examples, then companies might be willing to hang on in the hope of better things to come. But they are the latest in a series of cuts not just to solar but also to onshore wind, and come at a time when it seems maximum effort is being expended on removing roadblocks to shale-gas fracking and nuclear power.

And yet new figures out this week from Bloomberg New Energy Finance show the cost of building nuclear or gas-fired power stations is rising – as wind and solar costs fall.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) says it is exactly those falls in the cost of renewable technology that make it unnecessary for the hard-pressed consumer to continue to fund a high level of subsidies.

Certainly, there is a need for subsidies to be constantly reviewed and possibly adjusted – but not hit with a blunt axe. And while many people might think it is well-heeled homeowners who benefit from the feed-in tariff on their solar panelled-roofs, Alex Lockton, general manager of the installer TH White, will remind them that schools and community groups will suffer too.

“We have been engaged in community solar ventures, which have been a massive success story. But they are about to get blown out of the water if the government proceeds with its latest plans to cut subsidies by 87%,” Lockton said.

Most people – Lockton included – presume that the cuts agenda is being driven by George Osborne as he tries to meet Treasury austerity objectives as much as any serious attempt by the Decc to push forward energy policy.

“We are the builders,” Osborne claimed at the Tory party conference this week. But government cuts and tinkering have already destroyed a precious commodity in the world of renewables, as in any sector of commerce – and that is confidence.

source by:http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/08/it-could-be-lights-out-for-solar-power-under-this-government

Auric Solar flips switch on largest offset project in North American professional sports

October 8, 2015 Kelly Pickerel

Rio Tinto Stadium, the home of Major League Soccer’s Real Salt Lake as well as the USL Real Monarchs, flipped the ceremonial switch on the state of Utah’s largest privately-owned solar array. The 2,020-kW system was installed by Auric Solar.
The solar panels will offset 73 percent of Real Salt Lake’s total annual stadium power needs – the largest offset in North American professional sports and entertainment venues. The ambitious project was initiated in April 2015 and took six months to complete.

Nearly 95 percent of the solar array (made up of 6,423 solar panels) has been installed on new solar-covered parking structures, including an entirely new parking lot on the north side of the stadium. Covering the equivalent of 3.10 acres, the aggregation of the panels would cover 2.3 American football fields, 1.3 FIFA regulation soccer fields, extending 7.9 miles or 41,500 feet if stacked end-to-end.
“This project has positioned Real Salt Lake at the forefront of energy production and conservation in all of professional sports,” said Jess Phillips, principal of Auric Solar. “Auric Solar is helping the club harness the power of the sun to reduce its power consumption on a grand scale. It is impressive and ambitious to see the organization’s commitment to the community and environment.”
The environmental impact of the new solar array carries the carbon-dioxide reduction equivalent of removing 450 cars from the road or planting 47,278 trees annually, while providing enough to power, light, and heat 284 homes for a calendar year.
“Auric Solar’s expertise and innovation have made them the perfect partners to convert Rio Tinto Stadium toward energy self-sufficiency in the venue’s seventh year, while also improving our fan experience with the addition of covered and lit parking,” said Andrew Carroll, chief business officer for Real Salt Lake. “Our unique ability to assist Auric Solar in building brand awareness, both locally and across the industry, makes this partnership fully-integrated, mutually-beneficial, and uniquely symbiotic.  The entire Auric team – led by founders Trent Vansice and Jess Phillips – consists of great people, providing all of the ingredients for an exceptional long-term partnership.”

source by:http://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2015/10/auric-solar-flips-switch-on-largest-offset-project-in-north-american-professional-sports/

Solar Speaks: A chance to socialize and change the world through solar at SPI

August 25, 2015 Kathie Zipp
Solar Power International offers events specifically for women each year. Perhaps one of the longest running is a panel discussion and reception put on by the Professional Women in Solar Group.

Isabelle Christensen founded the group organically about 10 years ago in an effort to meet other women when she first joined the industry. “I could basically count the number of women in solar on both of my hands,” she said. “That’s how few we were back then.” They met over breakfast and continued to gather unofficially at SPI until the group became larger and was able to organize an official event at the show about five years ago.
Christensen expressed her gratitude to SEPA CEO Julia Hamm for being an early supporter of the group and volunteers from Solar Energy Tradeshows (SEIA and SEPA’s management company) for making the event possible
Christensen worked in social media marketing for a high-tech company about the time Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger developed his Million Solar Roofs Program in California. She recalled attending some of the earlier SPI shows which were much smaller. “All the exhibitors had table tops instead of the big booths you see at SPI now,” she said. “There I met the CEO of a solar installation company who offered me a position by asking if I’d be interested in changing the world.” She accepted.
Through the last decade Christensen has experienced the ups and downs of the solar market first hand. She watched the installation company grow successful and then go bankrupt. She then worked for a module manufacturer until it went out of business, then another and another. “It was a roller coaster, but I refused to give up,” she said. She now works for a European module manufacturer where she said she is excited to experience stability—not only in the company but in the solar industry.

Christensen’s involvement with Professional Women in Solar also remained stable through her solar career. Now in its ninth year, the group has grown, along with the number of women in the solar industry (from tens to thousands). But the group remains a grassroots organization totally supported by volunteers, and Christensen said it’s designed to stay that way. “Other women’s groups have been formed and also hold events, which is excellent,” she said. “Our focus has always been to provide more of a social gathering for women rather than an organized membership group where we have to solicit sponsorships and funding—that’s not what we do. We provide a social platform for people to form partnerships outside of their companies.”
For example, outside of her day job, Christensen runs nonprofit Green Ocean Ventures. The group helps finance female entrepreneurs starting solar businesses in developing countries like Tanzania and Afghanistan. She said many volunteers from Professional Women in Solar have participated in the nonprofit.
As the group has grown, so too have the discussions. Christensen said in the past they’ve had California Congresswoman Maxine Waters speak about fighting for women’s rights, and companies discuss their leadership training programs for women. This year’s focus will be on how women are contributing to the global solar industry. The panel will include Leslie Labruto of the Clinton Foundation.
“This event is a great venue for women to expand their network, not just professionally but also in terms of social contribution and how to give back,” Christensen said. “They can find similar people who want to change the world through solar, not just in U.S. but globally. Solar has given me so much professional and personal fulfillment, and this is a great way to give back and encourage other women to join the industry all over the world.”

source by:http://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2015/08/solar-speaks-a-chance-to-socialize-and-change-the-world-through-solar-at-spi/

Elon Musk's SolarCity has the world's most efficient solar panels

The company co-founded by Elon Musk, now produces the world's most efficient rooftop solar panels with a module efficiency of just over 22 percent. That bests the X-Series panels built by SunPower, which top out at around 21.5 percent. The results were confirmed by the Renewable Energy Test Center, a third party California photovoltaic testing company. SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive told Fortune that the company is shooting for a cost of around 55 cents per watt. It plans to build the 360 watt panels its 1GW solar panel plant in Buffalo, New York, set to open next year.

If 22 percent doesn't sound particularly great, you may be thinking of the (extremely expensive) panels used by NASA in space, which have nearly double that efficiency. However, the slight improvements made by SolarCity with its new panels will still have a big impact, bringing more power, less waste and a smaller footprint to consumers. The company said that a smaller pilot line is already producing the panels, which it will sell in select areas to start with. Once the main line is running, SolarCity will build enough of them to equip up to 200,000 homes per year.

source by : http://www.engadget.com/2015/10/02/elon-musk-solar-city-rooftop-efficiency/

Hybrid power system Exeron

 Exeron is an intelligent hybrid power system with various areas of application.

The system can combine effectively the power from different energy sources like sun, wind, diesel generator and grid. The unused energy is being saved in battery for further reuse. Exeron hybrid power system consists of AC and DC charge controllers, battery, DC-AC inverter and a microcomputer unit for monitoring and control.

There are 3 cases where the hybrid power system is tipically used.

1. An object connected to the electrical grid - Exeron ensures power back-up and significant cost savings, because the renewable energy is being primarily used.

2. An object powered from diesel generator - Exeron could optimize the OPEX costs with more than 90%!

3. An object not connected to the electrical grid - in this case all the electrical energy comes from renewable sources.

This is the typical case for remote telecommunication sites as well as military field camps and remote objects. Its easy operation, the suitability for fast scheduled maintenance and excellent maintainability in combination with its high reliability are a guarantee for saving time, resources and extremely valuable time.

Like all our products, Exeron has a highly reliable fail-safe structure and is constructed based on multiple fault-tolerant solutions.

Main technical details: 

    Umpp (DC): 140V ... 450 V
    U (AC) in.: 220 V / 3 x 400 V
    U (DC) out.: 48 V
    U (AC) out.: 220 V / 3 x 400 V
    Power: 2 kW ... 65 MW
    Max. energy storage in batteries: 315 MWh
    Intelligent diesel generator and grid control
    Software for remote monitoring and control


Source By : http://www.ips-group.net/en/products/6/25?gclid=CLuuy7jVpcgCFZEnjgodhzgGGQ

Discovery of a highly efficient catalyst eases way to hydrogen economy

Bathed in simulated sunlight, this photoelectrolysis cell in the lab of Song Jin, a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using a catalyst made of the abundant elements cobalt, phosphorus and sulfur.
Credit: David Tenenbaum/University of Wisconsin-Madison


Hydrogen could be the ideal fuel: Whether used to make electricity in a fuel cell or burned to make heat, the only byproduct is water; there is no climate-altering carbon dioxide.




Like gasoline, hydrogen could also be used to store energy.

Hydrogen is usually produced by separating water with electrical power. And although the water supply is essentially limitless, a major roadblock to a future "hydrogen economy" is the need for platinum or other expensive noble metals in the water-splitting devices.

Noble metals resist oxidation and include many of the precious metals, such as platinum, palladium, iridium and gold.

"In the hydrogen evolution reaction, the whole game is coming up with inexpensive alternatives to platinum and the other noble metals," says Song Jin, a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In the online edition of Nature Materials that appears today, Jin's research team reports a hydrogen-making catalyst containing phosphorus and sulfur -- both common elements -- and cobalt, a metal that is 1,000 times cheaper than platinum.

Catalysts reduce the energy needed to start a chemical reaction. The new catalyst is almost as efficient as platinum and likely shows the highest catalytic performance among the non-noble metal catalysts reported so far, Jin reports.

The advance emerges from a long line of research in Jin's lab that has focused on the use of iron pyrite (fool's gold) and other inexpensive, abundant materials for energy transformation. Jin and his students Miguel Cabán-Acevedo and Michael Stone discovered the new high-performance catalyst by replacing iron to make cobalt pyrite, and then added phosphorus.

Although electricity is the usual energy source for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, "there is a lot of interest in using sunlight to split water directly," Jin says.

The new catalyst can also work with the energy from sunlight, Jin says. "We have demonstrated a proof-of-concept device for using this cobalt catalyst and solar energy to drive hydrogen generation, which also has the best reported efficiency for systems that rely only on inexpensive catalysts and materials to convert directly from sunlight to hydrogen."

Many researchers are looking to find a cheaper replacement for platinum, Jin says. "Because this new catalyst is so much better and so close to the performance of platinum, we immediately asked WARF (the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation) to file a provisional patent, which they did in just two weeks."

Many questions remain about a catalyst that has only been tested in the lab, Jin says. "One needs to consider the cost of the catalyst compared to the whole system. There's always a tradeoff: If you want to build the best electrolyzer, you still want to use platinum. If you are able to sacrifice a bit of performance and are more concerned about the cost and scalability, you may use this new cobalt catalyst."

Strategies to replace a significant portion of fossil fuels with renewable solar energy must be carried out on a huge scale if they are to affect the climate crisis, Jin says. "If you want to make a dent in the global warming problem, you have to think big. Whether we imagine making hydrogen from electricity, or directly from sunlight, we need square miles of devices to evolve that much hydrogen. And there might not be enough platinum to do that."

Story Source:

The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:

    Miguel Cabán-Acevedo, Michael L. Stone, J. R. Schmidt, Joseph G. Thomas, Qi Ding, Hung-Chih Chang, Meng-Lin Tsai, Jr-Hau He, Song Jin. Efficient hydrogen evolution catalysis using ternary pyrite-type cobalt phosphosulphide. Nature Materials, 2015; DOI: 10.1038/nmat4410

Source by : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150914152626.htm